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Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

It's a tale as old as time: a long-standing hatred so strong, so deep rooted into the mythos of the Incipisphere, that the war between Prospit and Derse has somehow always been and will always be. There was perhaps once a time when the why of the conflict was widely known but in the eons since it began, or had already begun, even the Kings on their battlefield and the Queens on their thrones no longer knew why they fought the fruitless battle.

But on the battle rages, year after year, because it always has and always will.

On Derse, an assembly has been called for all citizens.

A hush falls over the Great Hall as the black Queen stands from her throne, the clacking of her heels on the polished stone floor echoing through the silent gathering of as many Carapacians as can fit into the space, as she steps forward to make her announcement.

Behind her on a raised platform are the Dersite Royals, the Princes to her left and the Princesses to her right.

She does not want them there, almost as much as they do not want to be there. But there they are, standing tall in their best Dersite purples, vibrant eyes watching the Carapacian audience, their people as much as hers.

She out-ranks them all, on paper. In practice, however, it seems that her panel of eternal idiots do as they please.

When she speaks, her words are direct and her message is clear: in one week, no sooner, no later, and for precisely twenty-four hours, Derse will play host to a small cadre of Prospitian dignitaries - the White Queen and her Royal court.

The Kings will, naturally, continue fighting on the front lines because the war will not cease, cannot cease, will never cease.

A loud applause rings politely through the Great Hall, until, almost inexplicably, the Archagent suddenly turns from his place of great importance at the base of the Queen's dais to hiss viciously at one of the Princes.

The Queen whips her head around to glare daggers at the Knight for disrupting her historic speech. The Archagent pulls a literal dagger from his arsenal, the only one with a rank high enough to threaten a Prince of Derse with minimal repercussions. He will earn himself no less than five hours of overtime for the slight, not because he pulled a knife on the Knight but for overshadowing the queen's announcement with his theatrics, however justified.

When the archagent releases his grip and the dagger flies point over end towards the Prince, the Queen says nothing. When the blade embeds itself in the Knight's chest, down to the hilt, no one looks more surprised than the Knight himself.

He reaches up towards the weapon and pulls it slowly from where it sits deep in his heart, trembling fingers already slick with his own blood as they close around the ornate handle of the Archagent's favourite knife.

"Well, that's fuckin' inconvenient," the Knight mumbles as he sways on his feet, more of a distraction now than the mere scuff of his sneakers on marble ever would have been had the Archagent simply done nothing.

He manages, only just, to wedge the dagger into the waistband of his deep violet ceremonial regalia, missing his belt entirely, before his knees give out and he collapses.

To his left, the Prince moves faster than the Archagent can see and catches the Knight before his head can hit the floor.

The Queen hisses violently at the scene playing out behind her.

Everybody out, she orders. Yes, even you. Of course he's not dead, you fool. All you've done is give him a new dagger to play with when he comes back. No, I won't make him give it back. Why? Because you were the one foolish enough to leave it lying around in his chest. Yes, it's his dagger now, by law of the land. Finders keepers. Returning it to you would mean stealing the Knight's new dagger. Yes, I'm sure he's not dead. Yes, he looks dead. He looks dead all the time and he never stays that way. None of them do. Now get out.

Everyone gets out. Swathes of shiny black Carapacians spill out of the Queen's ballroom as fast as they can, none wanting to be left alone with the Archagent and the Royals.

The Queen herself is already gone.

The Archagent tries again to find out if the Knight is, by any stroke of luck, dead.

"Oh my God, Noir, you know how much he hates the sight of his own blood," the Rogue says, exasperated by the question. "All you've done is make this super embarrassing for the both of you."

"And you've ruined a perfectly good shirt," chips in the Seer. "Surely there's a citation in that for you. I'm going to search the bylaws myself."

"Do you want me to take him?"

"Nah," says the Prince to the Rogue. "I've got him."

With the Knight, dead but not for long, thrown over his shoulder, the Prince pushes off the floor with his left foot and rises, just a few inches to test his balance, before floating out of an open window high up in the Great Hall of Derse.

The Rogue and the Seer watch them leave, the Rogue flipping off the Prince's retreating back with both hands and a bright laugh that seems so out of place in the Hall.

The Seer struggles not to laugh at the sight of the poor Knight hanging limply over the Prince's shoulder, violet cape swaying in the breeze.

The Knight will recover; his ego may not.

From beside the Seer, the Rogue lets out a sudden cry of frustration.

"Those fuckers better not be expecting us to clean this shit up!"

Dave wakes up with a start, hand flying to his chest as his fingers search for any sign of the Archagent-inflicted stab wound he received… eighteen hours and twenty-six minutes ago, if his estimate is correct.

He checks the time. He's right.

"You made the front page, broski," says a too-familiar voice, tinged with a too-familiar hint of warm affection. "The Knight was appropriately punished for the heinous crime of interrupting her Majesty the Queen with a single squeak of his enviously fashionable sneakers," Dirk reads aloud from the article splashed across the late edition of The Enquiring Carapacian. "Archagent Jack Noir has been charged with excessive dramatics and sentenced to work two hours of overtime to pay for his crimes."

"Quit reading that shit," Dave says. "It's giving me a headache already, I've got no fuckin' idea how you read that much horseshit every god damn day. Two hours is a cop out, I got nine times that on account of taking a long ass unintended death nap, but go off, justice system," he mumbles as he finally sits up, satisfied that his chest wound has closed over and someone else has taken care of the blood. "Why are you here?"

"Because your room is just so much cozier than mine," Dirk says, his comment laden with sarcasm as he folds the newspaper and drops it onto his lap. He's sitting with his feet kicked up on the end of Dave's bed, ankles crossed, as he leans back in the gaming chair he's clearly brought in from his own room because the squeaking of Dave's annoys him. "And someone had to get you into a fresh pair of jammies to avoid the comedy act that is the double pass-out combo."

"Did you burn the shirt?"

"Rose offered it to the Horrorterrors by way of throwing it the fuck out of her window," Dirk grins. "So, why'd you fumble it back there?"

"Where's my new dagger?" Dave asks in response. He's still sitting up in bed, but leaning against the wall for some extra support. Taking a blade through the heart is hardly a death sentence, at least not a permanent or even particularly long death sentence, but it will leave a scar and an increased need for sleep and attention for a few days. Dirk knows this, because of course he does, and Dave knows that he knows and is only humouring him and his higher than usual need for attention.

"Cleaned it for you and everything," Dirk replies as he produces the dagger, now safely sheathed in dark purple leather, from the desk beside him and spins it a few times in his fingers. "Why'd you fumble?"

Dave catches the dagger, reflexes already back to his usual functioning speed, when Dirk tosses it in his direction.

"Who says I fumbled anything?" Dave asks. He examines the Archagent's dagger and is impressed by the quality of this one compared to the others he's won over the years.

This makes 413 daggers won from the Archagent. Dirk's collection is almost as large. Rose and Roxy have less than half that number between them.

No one is impressed by Dave's collection.

Dirk lifts the paper back up from his lap, briefly, and raises an eyebrow in question.

"You calling our tireless investigative journalists liars?"

"No, I'm calling them slanderers and piss-takers," Dave says, and cocks his head when he hears footsteps. "Snarky broads on the approach."

He's less than enthused when Roxy sprawls herself across the foot of his bed like she lives there, even though she kind of does, and immediately starts fighting with Dirk's ankles for control of the space.

Rose plucks the newspaper from Dirk's hand when he holds it up for her to take, and she sits herself up on Dave's desk to read the headlines.

"Didja find out why he fumbled?" Roxy asks.

She's tying Dirk's shoelaces together when she asks.

"I didn't fumble shit," Dave scowls. "I guess I missed the memo about a party in Dave's room while he's busy recuperating after a fuckin' ordeal of a morning though."

"You've been unconscious, we could hardly invite you," Rose says from behind the tabloid. "Besides, this being your room means you were going to be here by default. What would you call what happened if not a fumble?"

"I moved my foot," he replies, scowl deepening. "Got knifed for it, will probably get a stern talking to and not be allowed to rock up to any public events for a while for causing a scene, same as usual. Why're we all making a federal fuckin' issue of this?"

"Because usually you'd just pull just enough Time shit to hold yourself still for that long," Dirk points out. "But something made you drop the concentration it takes you to swing that because you don't practice enough outside of public events."

Dave frowns again and stills the fingers that have been fidgeting with the hem of his shirt.

"By all accounts our Prospitian counterparts aren't half as awful as we are," Rose says brightly, her face still hidden behind the newspaper. "Not that an achievement of that calibre would be difficult, we make for atrocious figureheads," she says with a shrug.

"What would you know?" Dave asks.

He tries to sound more accusatory than curious but predictably he fails spectacularly. Roxy pats his ankle sympathetically as she stands back up, her mission to create a knot so complex Dirk will need to cut his laces away rather than ever untie them completed. Rose glances over the top of the paper, just briefly, to confirm the familiar look she expects to see on his face is there.

"Everyone out," Dirk announces when Rose leaves Dave's question hanging in the air.

Dave, unsure of how this development is going to play out for him because he knows that Dirk isn't including him in the everyone, stays put.

"Boo, pulling rank is low, even for you," Roxy says. She flicks his ear as she passes and Dirk swats her hand away like an annoying fly.

"The hierarchy exists, deal with it," he shrugs. "But if you could deal with it somewhere else, I'd appreciate that."

Roxy mimics him in a high pitched voice as she leaves, Rose a few steps behind. Dirk holds out an expectant hand for his newspaper; Rose reluctantly presses the tabloid into his open palm as she trails after Roxy, pausing in the doorway long enough to give Dave a look that he knows means that she's going to force him to repeat the conversation to her later anyway.

Dave knows he's fucked when Dirk raises an eyebrow in question, ever so slightly, and waits.

"You're in contact with one of them," he says.

Dirk doesn't phrase it as a question because he knows there's no need when Dave will crumble as soon as the silence drags on too long for his liking.

It takes three minutes and forty-two seconds for Dave to say anything, and when he does, it's a reluctant comment he only makes because Dirk will get the information out of him one way or another and sometimes it's just easier to skip the bullshit and get to the point.

"Define in contact," he mumbles as he lets himself slide down against the wall until he's lying in bed again. He drags a pillow over his head in a poor attempt to suffocate himself, but with the stabbing earlier he's already died enough for one day and gives up, throwing the pillow across his room where it hits his stereo and rebounds onto the floor.

"You've been exchanging words in one form or another with a Prince or Princess of Prospit," Dirk says.

He's kicked off his shoes and is sitting on the edge of his chair attempting to undo the laces, but there are so many knots in them that it's no doubt a futile effort.

"Maybe," Dave admits. "Once or twice."

"Roxy hasn't mentioned any breaches in the network firewall lately. How'd you do it?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Dave mumbles in response.

"You think I can't get off the local network without her knowing?"

"Why, are youin contact with a Prince of Prospit?"

"Yes," Dirk says bluntly. "All I can say is that for your sake, it better not be the same one."

"I didn't say it was one of the Princes."

"But it is."

Again, it's not so much a question as it is a statement.

"Yeah," Dave sighs.

"How'd you do it?" Dirk asks again. He drops his shoes to the floor, the laces beyond salvage.

"There's a robust fuckin' postal system on Prospit. I've got a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, you know how it is."

"That's precious."

"Fuck you," Dave says, except it comes out muffled because he's dragged a second pillow over his face, mortified by the progress of the discussion. "How did you do it?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

"I'd like to know how much longer you're planning to be in my room."

Dirk grins and takes the obvious hint. He picks up his shoes again and leaves them on the seat of his chair when he stands up.

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah, fine," Dave replies with a thumbs up. "Mortified by the road this conversation has gone down, and still undecided if I'm going to launch myself into the Green Sun once you finally fuck off, but fine and fucking dandy considering my temporarily severed aorta."

Dirk just laughs as he drags his chair out the door with him to leave Dave alone in his tower.

The Archagent glares at Dave as he stands tall in his ceremonial best, a brand new shirt featuring the correct amount of holes to accommodate his arms and torso with no extras over his heart. He's just waiting for so much as a toe out of line to repeat the incident from the week before, but Dave is using some kind of Time intervention to keep himself still.

The Archagent waits. He'll slip up eventually and when he does, there's a newly smithed dagger with his name on it just itching to end up in his chest. The Black Queen has forbidden any stabbings until after the Prospitian delegates have been welcomed, and the five of them are walking towards the dais.

In mere minutes, they will have been welcomed, and he will be free to stab without consequence.

Dave stares back, knowing that his unnaturally slow blinks are hidden from prying Carapacian eyes.

The White Queen steps forward, embraces her counterpart, and gestures for her court to move into place with a gentle wave of her hand.

Each of the Prospitian Royals are introduced in turn - The Heir, the Page, the Witch, the Maid. Two Princes, two Princesses, all dressed in the bright gold of Prospit, all looking around the Ballroom to take in every inch of the new space.

The Black Queen crooks a finger towards the Prince.

You, she says. Show them to their accommodations. They will have the same freedoms as the rest of your cohort while on Derse and are free to travel the city unescorted. Bring them to dinner this evening. Of course they're under surveillance. I said they were to be given the same freedoms as you, and you have your freedoms while under surveillance. Archagent, you bring your underlings. Yes, all of them. The welcome ceremony is now over. Everyone out.

Dirk nods, orders committed to memory, as the Black Queen leads the White out of the Hall through a side door.

The two groups of Royals stand opposing each other as the Hall empties, Derse on stage and Prospit off, those dressed in gold smiling politely at their violet-clad equals.

The Archagent, silently seething over the lack of an excuse for a stabbing to round out the welcome, leaves through the open front doors in the wake of his not-so-vague threat of murder the next time they meet.

"Hi," says the Heir brightly, waving at the Dersite delegation. "So, this is Derse, huh?"

Dave, unfrozen in Time once again, leans forward and vomits over the edge of the dais.

"Golly!" The Page exclaims, stepping back out of the splash zone.

"Why are you so embarrassing?" Roxy asks with a whine as she moves forward to rest a hand on Dave's shoulder. "Like obviously, what the fuck just happened and why'd you just upchuck everywhere but like, be cool, they seem less stabby than all the other guys we know."

"Where is he?" Dave asks, hands resting on his knees for support. "Heir, Page, Witch, Maid, that can't be right, it can't be right, where is he?"

"Where's who?" The Heir asks, puzzled by the question. "We're all here, you just said it yourself. Heir, Page, Witch, Maid. That's us. I'm John, by the way," he goes on, lifting off the floor until he's hovering at Dave's eye level.

He says something else but Dave doesn't hear it, he's too busy running through the facts in his head but they don't add up. Four Royals from Prospit stand in front of him. Yet, one is missing, he's sure of it. He would know, does know, knows that somehow even though he's staring right at the two Princes of Prospit, one of them is missing.

He hasn't been writing letters to the Heir, or the Page. Hasn't spent weeks, or months, or what feels like years of his eternal yet too short of a life waiting for a reply from either of them. Isn't convinced by now that he's fallen more than just a little bit in love with the Heir or the Page, or even with the Witch or the Maid.

"The Knight," Dave finally replies, wiping his mouth clean with his left sleeve. "Where's the Knight?"

"We don't have a Knight," says the Witch, slowly. "It's just the four of us, the same as you."

Dave is sure he's going to throw up again as the Witch's words sink in.

We don't have a Knight, she'd said. It's bullshit, he thinks, they're fucking with him, they have to be. He rolls his shoulder to shake Roxy's hand free and takes a running leap off the edge of the dais, springing into the air at only half his top speed until he's out the door.

Roxy snorts as Dave disappears in a flash, his form a deep purple blur as it takes off towards his tower faster than any of the other three of them can travel.

"So, that's Dave," Rose says as she glances down at the floor. "And that was Dave's breakfast."

"Gross," the Heir says, still hovering. "Where's he going?"

"Who knows?"

Rose's comment is laden with an unending lifetime of knowing better than to question any of Dave's motives for anything.

Dirk, meanwhile, is exchanging a knowing look with the Page.

He's interrupted when Dave drops back onto the dais beside him, breathing heavily, having just made the round trip from the Great Hall to his tower in less than thirty seconds.

Under normal circumstances, Dave would have been able to tell him just how fast he'd been, just how much he'd broken his old record by, but instead he's brandishing a letter at him.

"Look," Dave says between breaths. "The Knight," he adds, gesturing to the bottom of what looks like a thirteen page letter. "It's from the Knight, where is he?"

"I already told you," the Witch says, appearing alongside Dirk in the space of a blink to read over his shoulder. "We don't have a Knight."

"Then who the fuck am I, have I, been writing to?" Dave asks incredulously.

Dirk takes the bundle of papers to look more closely, as Rose takes a turn at trying to calm Dave back down. With a hand closing softly around his wrist, she guides him around the group of Prospitian Royals and down into the pews, where she sits beside him, hand on his knee, as he drops his head into his hands.

On pale golden pages, the missive is written on both sides of each sheet, an endless wall of text that on any other day Dirk would be delighted to even know exists, but today confounds him more than anything ever has, because at the bottom of the final page, beside the light watermark of Prospit printed onto the paper, there it is.

An inexplicable Royal signature he's never seen before, right there, in his hands.

YOUR NEXT LETTER BETTER NOT TAKE SIX FUCKING WEEKS OR I'M FLYING OVER THERE TO COLLECT IT MYSELF.

HRH THE KNIGHT OF BLOOD

Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

The Great Hall of Derse is filled with a rare cacophony as the state dinner to honour their Prospitian guests proceeds for the first time in living memory. The two Queens sit at a table of their own, raised high above all the others on the dais to give them a sense of privacy in the crowded room; the Black Queen might ordinarily be a ruthless ruler with a tight grip on her constituents, but she will not allow her guests to return home thinking that she does not value protocol above all else.

The White Queen is so far impressed by Derse's dedication to tradition, and willing to continue their conversation about the eternal war for Skaia.

At the next table sit the Archagent and his underlings, strategically placed between the Queens and their Royal courts to defend each from the other should the need arise. The Archagent has reluctantly agreed to keep his knives to himself for the duration of the dinner, although the Black Queen has permitted him to remove any offenders from the Great Hall should they dare disrupt the evening. He is then free to do as he wishes with them once they are out of sight. He wishes to stab them so many times.

Perhaps, the Archagent thinks, he will even be able to treat himself to stabbing his first Prospitian if he can find a single fault with any of the too polite and too well-mannered Royals dressed in gold.

One of them had looked at their Queen too long for his liking, even raised a hand to her.

She's waving, you idiot, the Black Queen had seethed at him.

The Derse Royals and their Prospitian counterparts sit at a table dividing the Queens and Agents from the rest of the invited Carapacians, who occupy tables that have replaced the pews for the evening. The Prince has been promoted to head of the table while Dave sits to his right, as usual. Rose and Roxy complete their side of the dining table in turn. The Page sits opposite Dave, with the Maid then the Witch to his left, while the Heir sits at the far end of the table.

The Heir had tried to protest his seating allocation, suggesting that the Witch take his place, but neither Queen would relent: format events had formal rules that must be followed and only those of the highest ranking were entitled to sit at the heads of the table. This rule seems to be one shared by both Prospit and Derse, although it has rarely been enforced in the past. Rose cannot recall a time when Dirk has been forced to the head of their usual table, and judging from the Heir's - John's - repeated mutterings involving the word dumb before he sat regardless, neither has the rule been enforced in their Court any time in recent memory.

The Prospitian Royals have no idea that the Knight is monitoring their every move. He watches the Heir laugh and swap stories of his afternoon exploring Derse with the Maid, who listens intently and smiles broadly at his animated handwaving. He notices the discomfort the Page displays as he glances nervously around the crowded room. He ignores that the Witch is watching him as intently as he is watching her, just as he ignores that Rose is trying to get his attention by prodding his ribs every few minutes.

When she wedges the sharp point of her left elbow between two of Dave's ribs, again, he feels an eyebrow twitch in irritation as he continues to deny her requests for his attention. He is too preoccupied with his own thoughts to do much more than sit quietly and move his dinner around his plate instead of eating it, because he's convinced that if he does it won't stay down for long.

He's already thrown up in front of the Prospitians once, and figures that's more than enough for one day.

Shit was massively embarrassing for so many reasons he does not care on which to dwell.

"Okay, this is stupid," Roxy says, exasperated by the planetary division in conversation at the table. "So we've got some kinda weird and fucked up illegal type mystery on our hands here but that doesn't mean we gotta sit here like huge dorks pretending we don't totally wanna make new friends and shit, because trust me, I totally wanna make new friends that aren't just the same idiots I see every day."

Dirk scowls at her, but she, as always, interprets the look as one of familiar affection rather than one of annoyance and continues to smile almost alarmingly across the table.

"Yeah, this kind of blows," the Heir pitches in from his place beside her. "I mean, obviously it's so cool to actually be here and I wish we had more than a bunch of hours left to hang ou-"

"Thirteen hours, twenty-six minutes," Dave interrupts without looking up from his plate, momentarily forgetting his commitment to shutting the fuck up.

"It's so neat that you can do that," John says, beaming despite the interruption. "What else can you do? You're a Time guy, right?"

"He is exceptionally good at using said ability to commandeer use of the bathroom right out from under the rest of us at the most inconvenient times," Rose says.

Dave does not rise to the bait and she is disappointed, or she would be disappointed if she didn't know he was not-so-quietly writhing with anxiety and presently incapable of vexing her in retaliation.

"You don't have your own bathrooms?" The Maid asks, a look of horror crossing her face at the conditions they might be exposed to by living on Derse.

"Yeah we do, he just likes using everyone else's to be as annoying as possible," Roxy says. "And he keeps using up all my good shampoo, the bitch. But mostly he just uses his Time shit to be annoying, yeah, that's his thing in all kinds of ways. What's cool about your thing?"

"Do not do the Windy Thing inside again!" Jade exclaims before the Heir can speak.

"Aw," John says with a grin that only proves that he knows exactly why he shouldn't do the Windy Thing inside. Again. "You can do a cool Spacey thing inside," he adds pointedly.

"Oh my God, you should totally do a Spacey thing!" Roxy says enthusiastically. "We definitely want to see you do a cool Spacey thing."

"Okay," the Witch grins. She looks thoughtful for a moment then carefully places a single grain of salt into the palm of her hand. The next second, she's holding a rock the size of a melon. "You can make it into a lamp if you want!"

"That is such a cool Spacey thing!" Roxy says excitedly as she takes the salt rock from Jade. "I can scrounge you up anything you want with my Voidy shit. Like, literally anything you can think of," she says, placing the rock down on the table in front of her plate. "And Dirk can rip your soul clean outta your body but he's only allowed to do it like, once every katrillion years or something or else it's like, a huge abuse of totally unbalanced power. Other than that his thing is just all about being bossy while his head is simultaneously up his own ass."

"Okay, enough horseshitting around," Dirk interrupts her with a less affectionate scowl than before. "We've got a grade-A mystery on our hands and only thirteen hours to at least make some progress on solving it."

"And twenty-three minutes."

"And twenty-three minutes," he adds after Dave's correction. "Meeting after we're all dismissed. Rose, you're in charge of Space and Breath. Roxy, Life. I'll take Hope. Dave, bring yourself and anything else that might help."

He stops talking when the Archagent glares at him from the next table over. There is a knife embedded in the wood grain as the Archagent eats, partly for show and partly for ease of access should he feel the need to embed the blade into one of the Royals. He eyes off Dirk in return, fingers inching towards the blade because it has been too long since the Prince has given him a legitimate reason for a stabbing.

Oh, how the Archagent longs to find a reason, any reason, to drag the Prince outside and stab him no less than thirty seven times.

Thirty-eight would be excessive. Obviously.

"See what I mean about the head in ass situation?" Roxy says in a loud whisper, thumb pointed to the far end of the table at Dirk as she winks at the Heir.

Beside her, Rose smiles at the jab but adds nothing as Dave still sits solemnly by her side. She does, however, notice that the Page is looking at the Prince with an apologetic grin.

"Wow, what is this place?"

The Heir is mesmerised by the empty core of Derse's moon. He drops out of the air to sit on the edge of Dave's sacrificial slab, feet hanging over the edge of the ancient stone into the unending black below.

"Have you never visited your moon's core before?" Rose asks as she sits beside John. "Where else would you host a secret rendezvous you don't want anyone overhearing?"

"Wherever we want?" John replies, eyebrows furrowed as if he only half understands the question. "Why does it matter if someone hears us?"

"I have to assume that you're not under full surveillance on Prospit, are you?"

"No," the Witchy says simply. She drops out of the air to sit opposite the Heir, on the edge of Dirk's slab. "But you made us sneak around for so long because someone was following you, right?"

"Right," Rose replies. "Par for the course, unfortunately."

More unfortunately, one of the Archagent's relatively competent underlings had been assigned to follow her throughout the evening, which meant a lot more backtracking through the city to lose him before they could slip though a hidden entry to the core unseen.

From the blackness behind her, Rose hears Roxy flying along to meet them; Roxy denies it when the others call her out, but she frequently makes flight noises to accompany her movements through the air when she feels the atmosphere is making too little. Dave does the same.

"Heeeey," Roxy says brightly when she drops down on Rose's other side and smacks a loud kiss to her cheek. "Janey, sit over there," she adds, gesturing wildly to the empty space opposite her on Dirk's slab. "No boys yet?"

"Hey!" John protests.

"Sheesh, relax. I meant our boys," Roxy says. "I love him and all but I told you before, Dirk's head is so far up his own ass that he's normally around ages before anyone else so he can dictate all the minutiae that no one gives a crap about except him."

"I suppose it's important that he takes his role seriously," the Maid says.

"Hey, I take my job seriously!" John protests. "And I don't think my head is up my own ass, is it?"

"You'd look stupid if it was," Jade giggles. She stretches out her left leg and John does the same with his right, their feet meeting in the air between the two sacrificial slabs of the Dersite Princes.

"You do a wonderful job, John," Jane says reassuringly. "And you do it while keeping your head safely where we can all see it. Oh, someone's coming," she adds.

Dave comes to a stop mid-air when he notices where they all are. Hesitant or too superstitious to rest on his own slab, he takes the empty place between the Witch and the Maid on Dirk's, opposite Rose.

"And how are you?" Rose asks cautiously.

She knows that Dave is wound tighter than she remembers him being any time in recent memory. The last time he was even remotely this wound up, either a hundred days or a hundred years ago, he had ended up being the only one to notice that several of the Horrorterrors had breached the Veil and were on course to intercept Derse's moon.

The Black Queen had rewarded him for that, giving him an entire month of immunity to the Archagent's rule.

"Fuckin' peachy," Dave replies shortly. "Just found out I've been pranked by Paradox Space for the last fuck knows how long, but peachy, sure."

"How long has this salacious affair of yours been going on, exactly?" Rose asks, an eyebrow arched in curiosity.

"Fuck you," he snaps. "So is this legit or what?"

He hands an envelope to the Witch, who examines both sides without opening it. He appreciates that, considering that he knows the content of each letter by heart and is well aware of which secrets are enclosed in that specific one.

"What do you mean by legit?" Jade asks. "It just looks exactly like all the envelopes we have at home," she adds with a small frown, and passes the letter back over him to the Maid. "It's just a regular envelope."

"From Prospit?"

"Yeah."

"What do you use them for?" Rose asks.

"Sending letters," the Maid replies.

Dave is ready to fire back another snarky comment, but hesitates when he realises that Jane has spoken without condescension.

He does not know how to reply to a comment made without ulterior motive.

"We mostly just write dumb stuff to each other," Jade says as Jane hands the Prospitian envelope back to Dave. "Nothing serious, just silly letters and things like that. Jake likes to draw adventure maps and send them to us all and make a game of who can find the treasure he's hidden first."

"Boy howdy, do I!"

The Page arrives along with the Prince, who does not apologise for his lateness and glares at Roxy as if daring her to ask for a reason.

Her mouth is open, ready to ask them exactly what took so long and what was important enough to delay Dirk's arrival, when the Prince speaks up before she can press on his last available nerve for the evening.

"Show me," Dirk says, standing over Dave's shoulder. The Page, meanwhile, takes a quiet seat next to the Witch who simply pats his knee in greeting while Dave holds the letter up.

"Envelope only," he says seriously. "Jade says it's legit Prospitian stationary. Now what?"

"I don't know," Dirk frowns.

Roxy gives an exaggerated gasp intended to mock him, and the Witch and the Maid join her in a quiet laugh at his expense.

He ignores them and flips the envelope over a few times to take in each and every detail on the outside; he won't embarrass Dave by opening it, not here, not until the Prospitian Royals are safely in their beds for the night and he can get Dave alone to ask the questions he's still trying to figure out.

It looks identical to the letter Dave briefly showed them earlier in the day. Pale golden paper with a silhouette of Prospit watermarked into the intricate border design and a stamp featuring an image of Skaia. No return address on the rear, something unnecessary when the postal system is reportedly as reliable as the one located on Prospit. Dave's details on the front, simple and straightforward, written in sharp, bold lettering; HRH THE KNIGHT OF TIME, DERSE'S MOON. A full address is apparently not necessary when utilising something of a black market postmaster, or perhaps Prospit's postal system really just is that good.

"It just looks like a regular letter to me," John says with a shrug from where he has drifted up to hover over Dirk's shoulder.

"And you really don't have any Knights?" Dirk asks.

"We fuckin' established that already," Dave mumbles, hand reaching up expectantly for the letter he is not willing to part with for even a second.

Dirk flips the missive over once more for any additional clues, but there are none, at least not that he can see. Dave wedges the letter safely down the side of his boot where it will be well hidden until he can return it to its regular place of safe-keeping.

Dirk does not miss the way his thumb brushes lightly over the postmark before he does.

"It's just the four of us, like you," Jade says. "We didn't even know your titles until the trip here. The White Queen told us so we could make a good impression."

"You did better than us on account of none of you guys puking everywhere," Roxy points out. "We didn't even get that much prior info, but our Queen is," she pauses, searching for the right description. "A fucking nutcase."

"How much of a nutcase?" John frowns. He's still hanging in the air but upside down by now.

"Yes," Rose answers for the Rogue.

"Wowzers," Jake says with a low whistle.

"When did you last send a letter?"

Dave has to briefly think before he can answer Dirk's question, converting minutes to hours and hours to days to find the correct response.

"Two weeks, three days, twenty hours, and forty-two minutes."

It's Dirk's turn to think after Dave responds.

"New plan," he says. "We need to get back before they notice all of us missing at once. Team Prospit, we want to see anything official you've got with you. Rose, you're lead. Go with them, get them back into the towers without being seen, and start looking for seals, signatures, watermarks, the lot. We need as many points of comparison as you can get," he explains.

"Now?" Rose asks.

"Now," Dirk confirms. "We'll catch up with you soon."

Dave watches on as Rose leads the four Prospitian Royals through the darkness of the moon's hollow core, the Witch pausing to wave before continuing on until they all fade from view just seconds later.

He waves back, too late for her to notice.

Roxy stands and leaps across to join the other two on Dirk's sacrificial slab, dragging Dave's arm until he turns around and moves away from the edge. She sits cross-legged beside him, grinning widely at Dirk because she knows he's about to ask her to do something stupid, dangerous, or both.

"This is a potentially stupid idea," he starts, moving to stand opposite her. "But I want you to try and find us some things."

"Oh, Dirk," Roxy sighs dramatically. "You know this bitch can't resist a stupid idea, and the stupider the better."

"Fantastic," he says. "Show her the letter."

"Go fuck yourself," Dave snaps with a frown.

"Dude, I promise you, no one wants to read the sordid details even though it would give us years of new material to work with. Just show her the signature," Dirk says.

Dave reluctantly reaches into his boot once more and retrieves the letter. He knows they are both watching him closely as he opens the envelope, fingers trembling as he flips to the final lines. Written there at the bottom of the page, just as it had been on the previous letter, is that unfamiliar signature, a title belonging to no one but obviously to someone, and their only irrefutable proof of what - who - they are searching for.

HRH THE KNIGHT OF BLOOD

"There," Dave mumbles.

He doesn't let go of the letter even as Roxy holds the other edge lightly between her fingers.

"If it takes you longer than twenty minutes," Dirk says. "Give up and try again tomorrow."

"Okay, will do, Commander Bossybritches," Roxy says, complete with mock salute. "But what exactly am I doing? Ya girl loves to quit shit, but I gotta know what I'm giving up on, y'know?"

"Two parter," Dirk says as he drags Dave to his feet by the elbow, preparing to fly them both out of the core whether he wants to leave or not. "One, find the last letter he sent, envelope and all. Two," he goes on, ignoring the garbled noise of protest from Dave because his letter is still in Roxy's hand and out of his reach. "Find us something that belongs to him."

Chapter Text

The Light Kingdom of Prospit, Skaia's Orbit

It is a day, seemingly like all other days on Prospit, when the relative peace is broken by a scream that causes the Sylph to pause her duties.

It is not that the scream is uncommon; in fact, a day that passes without a scream or several would be more unusual. But this scream is not part of an elaborate role-play game, or an argument that is bordering so close to out of hand that a physical fight is inevitable without her intervention.

It is the scream of an overdramatic Knight who cannot seem to let a single day pass without adding to her workload.

The Sylph sighs to herself and finishes her current stitch of golden embroidery on a new tunic for the Page before setting the project aside. It is a short walk from her respiteblock to the Knight's to investigate and when she arrives it is just in time to dodge an unidentifiable object that hits the doorframe with a disconcerting crash.

"What is wrong now?" The Sylph asks.

"I'm going to kill Terezi!"

"No, you're not," she says calmly. "At least not permanently."

"Good," the Knight seethes, crushing a wad of paper in his clenched fist. "Because when she pops back up like the noxious fucking trash plant she is I can lay her out again!"

"Might I remind you," the Sylph says, sidestepping the mess of the Knight's belongings to cross the room, moving hazardously closer to him. "That each time you have previously killed her, I have been the one stuck consoling you and your immediate regret until she woke up."

"I'm sick of her sticking her overgrown sniff nub where it doesn't fucking belong!"

"At the risk of sounding too much like an overbearing lusus, I think you need to relax."

The Knight turns on his heel, his cheeks flushed as red as his blood, and for the briefest of moments the Sylph is sure that today is the day he takes his anger out on her.

Instead, his hands fall to his sides and he takes a deep, shaky breath, before dropping to the floor of his room, right in the middle of the mess he has created.

His face crumples, and the Sylph cannot help her instinct to coddle him.

She makes her way to him and sits carefully by his side, a hand coming to rest gently on his knee.

"Stop that," the Knight says, half-heartedly swatting her away. But the fight has gone from him and he cannot bring himself to do more than that, especially not to her.

For all of his explosive outbursts, he is quite probably in possession of the softest heart on Prospit.

"What can she possibly have done today that she hasn't done a thousand times before?"

"She stole," he starts, then pauses awkwardly. "Something."

"Something," she repeats slowly.

"Something."

"Karkat," the Sylph says, returning her hand to his knee, and this time he lets it remain there. "Did you consider asking her to return your something rather than shifting the contents of your entire wardrobe to the floor like a wiggler?"

"I did that before I decided it was a theft," he mutters, refusing to look at her.

"Has there been a theft or have you decided there has been a theft?"

"Why does it fucking matter?"

"Because those are two very different things."

"Let me put it this way, Kanaya," the Knight says with a scowl. "The," he pauses, again on the threshold of accidentally exposing the truth of what has been stolen from him. "I left something where it belongs and now it's not there. Ergo, that's basic fucking theft."

"Ergo?" Kanaya questions as one corner of her mouth twitches up.

"You heard me," he says, looking away as he feels a similar expression creeping up on his own face but unwilling to let her see it.

"Why won't you tell me what was stolen?"

"Because you're the fussiest, most meddlesome creature I've ever known and if I give you the smallest of details about my, frankly, personal and incredibly private fucking life, you'll never let me forget it and it's impossible to stay dead for long enough around here to give my hear ducts a fucking break," Karkat says.

But even as he is still talking, he stands from his cocoon of formal wear and collects something from the very back of his wardrobe, hidden beneath a pile of golden sweaters.

When he returns, sitting back amongst the mess that he will ignore for days and falsely claim to enjoy, the Sylph can see that he is holding a box of papers.

Pages and pages of pastel purple papers, crammed back into matching envelopes.

Not papers. Letters.

And they are not written on Prospitian stationary.

"Are these from..?"

Karkat nods slowly.

"And one is missing," he says, swallowing nervously. "I'm so fucked."

Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

It is late when Roxy sneaks through a door that has been left ajar. She is unsure if it is deliberately open for her or just that way because Dave forgot to close it, too wrapped up in his own misfortune to think three steps ahead. But either way, she creeps into his bedroom with a new friend in tow, where they find the Knight lying dramatically on the floor as he stares in the direction of his tower window.

"Wow, you look like shit," the Rogue says. She steps over Dave to sit beside him, legs outstretched, and drags him by the shoulder of his pyjama shirt until his head is resting on her lap. "You've got it bad, huh?"

"Yeah," Dave sighs, admitting it to her for the first time.

He feels pathetic saying it out loud, but he's lying on the floor and staring out his window and knows he looks pathetic, so there's no point trying to hide it.

"I can't believe you've kept this shit to yourself," she says. "Like, I'm super impressed that you haven't been blabbing about your top secret illegal dalliance to anyone who'd listen, but I'm even more impressed you did it in such a weird old fashioned way."

"Kinda goes hand in hand with the whole keeping it a fuckin' secret thing," he mumbles.

"Okay but consider this," Roxy says. "Oh my God, whoops, sit down wherever you want, Janey," she adds with a giggle, waving a hand to gesture around Dave's room. "I've decided that Janey is my new bee-eff-eff, and she's here because she loves mysteries."

"Yeah, we met this morning," Dave says, turning his head to watch as the Maid sits cross-legged on the end of his bed. "I'm the guy who threw up everywhere then had a fuckin' breakdown."

"Are you feeling any better now?" Jane asks with more genuine sympathy than Dave ever remembers hearing from anyone he's known his entire life.

"No," he snorts. "What am I considering?"

"Oh yeah," Roxy says with a laugh. She idly twists a finger around a lock of Dave's hair. "If you'd told me you were doing hella illegal shit I could've just set you up outside the local network."

"The what now?"

"How do you think Dirk's been doing it all this time?"

"You'll zip it right there if you don't want to end up number one on tomorrow's published shit list."

As if he's been summoned by the mere mention of his name, which no one who knows him could entirely discount as a possibility, the Prince is standing just inside the still-open door.

"Maybe I should submit you for the list," Roxy shoots back with a daring grin. "You've been late twice today and that's like, more than enough evidence you've been body-snatched or something."

The door creaks and the Page slips inside as well, peeking back into the hall before he carefully closes the door without a sound.

He steps around Dirk, who still seems to be trying to make his point by staring Roxy down from the doorway, and sits next to the Maid.

"Can't a guy get his sulk on alone around here?" Dave asks from the floor.

"But I've got something for you," Roxy says as she slips something from her pocket and dangles it above his scowling face.

Dave's mouth drops open and he sits up so fast that his head is spinning as he flails for Roxy's gift. He snatches the envelope from between her fingers and flips it over, knowing that there's no way it can be what he thinks it is, what it looks like.

The wax seal on the reverse has already been lifted; it hasn't been broken and the envelope hasn't been torn. The missive has been opened with care, slowly and painstakingly, as if to preserve it just how it arrived.

But on the final page of the letter, placed back inside the lilac envelope for safekeeping, exactly as he expects to find, is his own title and signature. hrh the knight of time is scrawled there in his hurried handwriting, complete with a smeared doodle of his personal clockwork insignia, the ink smudged by his own hand just over two weeks and three days earlier.

"This is mine," Dave says, slowly, looking at her while his wide eyes stay safely hidden behind his glasses. "Did it ever get there?"

"It was already open when I yoinked it back," Roxy says with a shrug. "So I'm guessing that yeah, it got there."

"So it worked?" Dirk asks. He's finally moved from his place by the door and is perched against the edge of Dave's desk, opposite the end of the bed where the Maid and the Page both look awed by the proof of Roxy's abilities.

"Obviously," she huffs at his doubt. "I'm too good at this shit, right? We don't even know where this guy actually is and I still managed to jack his shit."

"So, this fellow says he's from Prospit, and is currently on Prospit, but also somehow he's not?" The Page muses out loud. "That's a doozy of a brain scratcher, alright."

"Dave?" Roxy questions; Dave is staring at the pages of the letter he sent, weeks in the past, as if he might find evidence that the words have been read by the intended recipient before being pulled back through the Void to end up in his own hands once again. "I also got this," she adds, more softly than before, holding out her hand.

In her palm lies a ring.

It is a ring identical to the ones they all own, have always owned, that are worn not only by themselves but also by the four Prospitian Royals. They have always owned them, worn them as an expected part of their full formal regalia.

But in Roxy's palm lies a ring engraved with an unfamiliar signet; each of them in the room can guess what it stands for.

Dave is already on his feet before she can implore him to take it from her. He's standing at his desk, has shoved Dirk aside, and is rummaging through piles of papers covered in half-drawn illustrations and moving cords and CDs aside as he searches, desperately, for something.

A pen.

He flips over a rough sketch of something monstrous, more likely than not a Horrorterror he has seen in his dreams.

The message is short and takes him only twenty-six seconds to write.

He is uncomfortably aware that they are all watching him, not only the Prince and the Rogue but also the Maid and the Page, who have been unwittingly dragged into his drama. They watch as he throws his pen aside and drops back onto the rug beside the Rogue. He can feel their eyes on him as he swaps the Knight of Blood's signet ring with his own, taken directly off his little finger and immediately replaced with the other, then places both it and his note in her hand.

"I need you to do whatever you did before but in reverse this time," he says from where he kneels beside Roxy. "Now. Right now."

"I don't know if I can," she replies with a small frown. "I've never tried to put something back before."

"You can," Dave says, not caring if his statement is true in the slightest. "Now. Do it."

She is unsure if she can, but she wants to, will try to, because she has never, in all her unending years, seen Dave like this and just wants for him what she wants for the others, to be happy.

So, she closes her eyes.

Thinks about Dave, and of the golden cities of Prospit, and the warm weight of his signet ring in her palm.

Then, the Maid gasps.

Dirk has a plan.

He always has a plan, because he cannot help it, but this plan is far more convoluted than anything he has tried to plan before. It is a plan that involves putting all of Rose's theoretical research into practice without solid proof that any of it is true. It involves moving quickly, while night still holds, to give them the best chance of success. It involves all four of the Prospitian Royals, because without them integral parts of his plan will not succeed.

The Page says he is Hopeful it will work, and his comment manages to earn a rare and genuine grin from the Prince before they split up to go and wake the others.

They all meet back in Dave's tower room just minutes later to go over every step of the Prince's plan. Rose thinks it will work, but there will be consequences. What kind of consequences, she doesn't know. She can't See that outcome, but trusts that the plan, as it stands, will get them to the Knight.

Roxy will be staying behind because she is exhausted. She has sent Dave's scrap of paper back and forth through the Void no less than a dozen times and can hardly keep her eyes open while Dirk explains each role.

Although, that could just be that she cannot keep her eyes open through another one of his monologues.

The Prince and the Maid will be the first to act, setting the plan in motion. The Heir will go with them, and the Page will stay behind with the Seer and the Rogue.

The Knight and the Witch will be the only ones to venture beyond Derse.

It is a stupid, impulsive plan and Dirk knows it; he doesn't like stupid and impulsive plans, but he knows that Dave does and would be willing to go along with a far stupider and far more impulsive plan than this.

He gets the feeling that Dave would go along with anything to find the other Knight.

Rose tips her head, and Dave steps away from the others with her. Outside his tower window, so far in the distance that it is nearly invisible to the naked eye, he catches sight of a glint of gold amongst the endless black.

"I can only inform you of how this will go until you breach the Furthest Ring," she says quietly. "It will work. It will go to plan. You will make it through. But beyond that, I don't know. I don't know what will happen as soon as you leave this plane of reality, or if reality is even what lies beyond," she explains.

"Chances of permadeath?" Dave asks. He's trying not to look as nervous as he is, but his arms are crossed over his chest and his left pinky finger is tapping endlessly against his right forearm.

"Anywhere from yes to inevitable?"

"Fan-fucking-tastic."

"Be alert. Stay on task and do not deviate from Dirk's plan. Do you understand?" Rose says. She takes Dave's hand in hers and holds it tightly; they have never been apart, have never considered the possibility of the other not being there, and it is only just dawning on her that the pure nothingness of the Furthest Ring could very easily swallow him alive.

"Don't think with my dick, got it," he says in response, trying to grin but failing beyond the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

"More crass than I would have phrased it, but in essence, yes, it would be more beneficial if you thought with your brain. Be sure to come back in one piece, I don't think I could endure being led through eternity by Dirk alone."

"I'm telling him you said that," he scoffs.

When he glances over Rose's shoulder to see if the others are ready to make a move, it's just in time to see the Witch throw herself at the Page for a hug so enthusiastically that Jake almost falls back against the wall.

"I'm so jealous!" The Page says with a laugh as he hugs her tightly. "What an adventure you're about to undertake, who would've thunk it could get more exciting than simply visiting Derse!"

"I know!" Jade exclaims. "You be careful staying here, Derse is full of Agents, remember?"

"I won't be venturing too far from these lovely ladies," he replies, holding her at arm's length.

Dave turns when he hears a gagging noise, and of course it's Roxy, miming revulsion at the heartwarming scene between the two Prospitians.

"Gross, right?" The Rogue says with a grin. She holds out a fist and Dave bumps his knuckles against hers. "I'm totally gonna crap out as soon as everyone clears outta here because wow am I fucked from playing your personal email service tonight, but y'know, don't die."

"I'll try," Dave replies. "You're really just gonna hit the hay and leave tower security up to Rose and some guy we just met?"

"Yeah, why not?" Roxy shrugs. "Rose says you'll be fine, so I'll see you in the morning."

He can't argue with her logic; he doesn't bother filling her in on the fact Rose has no way to See the outcome of their mission.

Dirk catches his eye then and Dave nods in response. He takes Caledfwlch from where it hangs on his wall and swaps it from the ornate scabbard he'd used for the formal events earlier in the day, into one of plain leather, dyed so deeply purple it looks almost black and blends in with the plain outfit he's changed into for the journey. He slings the weapon over his shoulder, the same way Dirk's katana hangs over his, and after a moment of hesitation he adds the knife he won a week earlier to his belt. Just in case.

The Heir asks if it's time to go then, and Dirk confirms that yes, it is.

The hardest part will be making it to their first location unseen.

Or, it would have been, if they hadn't met the Witch.

Nights on Derse are when things are at their most dull. The Black Queen retreats to her chambers in the palace and the Royals to their towers on the moon. Things are no different just because they are playing host to the most insufferable of creatures, the kind from Prospit. The prison falls quiet, and the journalists all move into their offices to write up the events of the day for publication in the next issue of The Enquiring Carapacian.

In his office, the Archagent sits at his desk to file his daily paperwork. Surrounded by three Fenestrated Planes, he is able to monitor movement all over the planet without needing to move. Although, this late in the evening, or early in the morning depending on perspective, most of the movement comes from his own Agents.

He signs a report about prisoner conditions and promptly files it as unimportant. Most of the reports he signs are unimportant, but this one reminds him to glance up at one of the Planes; this quick assessment shows that the Brute is, as expected, playing darts in the prison and using a prisoner as his dartboard. This is an idiotic move for an Agent, because all Agents should know that darts cannot pierce Carapacian skin.

It is exhausting to be in charge of idiots, a sentiment that the Archagent shares with his Queen.

The next of the Planes shows him the Dignitary arguing with a shopkeeper. Good for him, mixing his work collecting taxes with after-hours recreation at a late night club.

The Archagent scans the final Plane for the Droll but he cannot be found. The scene keeps changing as the feed searches for its target. It changes again, then once more, and then, suddenly, the corner pane cracks and the image turns to static before it shatters and the entire Plane goes dark.

The Archagent growls, baring his teeth when he recognises the cause of the crack.

There is a familiar knife embedded in his third Plane; it is the knife he lost a week ago, the very same knife he embedded in the Knight's chest from an impressive distance for a very deserved reason.

But that knife is no longer his, which means-.

"Sup?" The Knight asks non-chalantly.

The Archagent did not hear him approach. That would have been bad enough, because he cannot stand being outwitted by the Knight, but what is even worse is that he realises, too late, that the Knight is not alone.

The Archagent's body slumps forward onto his desk.

His head, now entirely independent from his shoulders, hits the carpet with a wet thud.

The Prince sheaths his unbreakable katana.

Chapter Text

The Light Kingdom of Prospit, Skaia's Orbit

The Knight screeches in alarm when a slip of paper materialises on his desk.

It would have been embarrassing enough if he was alone in his tower but he has been trying to convince the Seer to leave for the last two hours.

Mercifully, she ignores his scream of surprise just as she has ignored his every request to get the fuck out.

He snatches the paper up from where it lies, but pauses when he brushes his signet ring aside; he has not touched it in days but the metal is strangely, inexplicably warm.

His eyes scan the paper, first one side and then the other, and he reads the short note written in a familiar handwriting three times before he recognises it so out of its usual context, and the post script takes even longer to make any sense.

He picks up his signet ring - the signet ring - again and stares intently at the engraving that should be his own insignia but is instead a cog of clockwork he has seen countless times before.

"Fuck," he says. "Fuck!"

"I'm trying to sleep here," the Seer responds lazily from the floor behind him, where she is obviously doing nothing of the sort.

"Not hard enough," he mutters. He pushes his chair back from his desk and moves to stand in his doorway, the paper still clutched in his fist. "Kanaya!"

"Why can't you take an extra five steps to her door instead of shouting like a wild barkbeast?"

"Because shut the fuck up, that's why."

"Ooh, you are in a delightfully atrocious mood," the Seer says with a devious grin as she sits up on the rug. "Why won't you tell me whatever you are going to tell her?"

"Kanaya!" The Knight calls again, more urgently this time. "Because you're an insidious creature that only exists to find out how long it takes an immortal blood pusher to implode with rage."

The Seer cackles as the Knight shouts for the Sylph again, now teetering dangerously on the edge of what she knows to be the lead up to a deeply embarrassing tantrum on his part.

And, sometimes his tantrums are embarrassing for her as well because it is almost too easy to get dragged deep into his histrionics.

"Tell me," she says once, then twice, then a third time for good measure. "You know you want to tell me."

"What I want is for Kanaya to get off her spinal crevice any time this lunar cycle and get over here because this is an emergency!"

The Knight is standing in his open door, alternating between shouting for the Sylph and trying, yet failing, to pacify the Seer. When neither of them respond in the few seconds of silence that his inability to shut the fuck up allows him, Karkat lets out a yell of frustration and hunches over with his hands on his knees for support, sucking in deep breath after deep breath.

"Are you having a panic attack?" Terezi cocks her head curiously in his direction.

"Get off my fucking bulge!"

"Yes, it seems as though he is very much having a panic attack," Kanaya says as she breezes through the door. She tries to direct Karkat further into the room with a hand on his shoulder but he shouts at her in response and jerks away from her touch.

"I can smell it from here," the Seer says, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

"Look at this," Karkat says.

He brandishes the slip of paper towards where he thinks the Sylph is, because he's sitting down with his head lying on his desk to avoid ending up in a position that is too easy for her to coddle him.

are you really on prospit or just fucking with me
well collect your reply in exactly thirty minutes
ps ive got yours

"What is this?" Kanaya asks. She examines the reverse of the slip where a hideous creature is drawn, then reads the missive again. "And who is in possession of your what?"

Head still down, and accompanied by a groan of embarrassment, Karkat lifts his arm up for her to examine his hand.

"Can someone please tell me why Karkat is having a panic attack this time?" Terezi asks.

"He has secretly been writing to an unknown suitor from Derse," Kanaya says simply.

The Seer knows it to be true because Karkat wrestles his hand free from the Sylph so he can flip her off before letting Kanaya take it once more to continue her examination. Somehow, and for some reason, she doesn't even want to make fun of him for it because his endless well of personal anguish already seems to be doing the job for her.

"This is not yours," the Sylph says, frowning at the signet ring on Karkat's little finger. "And this is not a letter you showed me earlier."

"It magically appeared on my desk like some kind of possessed hoofbeast shit straight out of a fucking movie," he moans.

"Is that why you screamed like a wiggler?" Terezi asks. "The first time."

"I'm going to stuff my fist so far down your protein chute while you sleep," he says. "Yes."

"And you are entirely sure this is from him?" Kanaya asks; Karkat nods. "How will he collect your reply?"

"I don't know! How would I know that? I don't even know how he got it here except for the dubious explanation of I guess it's fucking magic!"

"Have you written one?"

"One what?"

"A reply," Terezi says, as if he is the idiot in this scenario.

"When would I have written a reply, hmm?" The Knight says, lifting his head off the desk; it's a risky move, because he is on the verge of his mild panic attack turning into something entirely incoherent, but it feels necessary to accompany his comment with a glare.

"Well write one now, dummy!" Terezi exclaims.

OF COURSE I'M ON PROSPIT. IF I WAS GOING TO FALSIFY INFORMATION FOR MY OWN ENTERTAINMENT, WHY WOULD I LIE ABOUT THAT?
HERE'S AN EQUALLY INTELLIGENT QUESTION FOR YOU THEN: ARE YOU REALLY ON DERSE? HA!
P.S. HALF AN HOUR IS TOO LONG. THAT GIVES ME TOO MUCH TIME TO OVERTHINK WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING HERE.

yeah definitely on derse over here purple fucking everywhere agents out for blood see overleaf for horrorterror of the fucking month star of my dreams gotta admire all those teeth huh
as for whats happening right now its hard to explain beyond just saying shenanigans are afoot but im making roxy do her void shit to yank the paper back and forth but i dont know how many times she can do it though so to get to the point any chance you can prove the prospit thing
ps yeah same five minutes it is

I'M ON A PLANET AND IT'S GOLD, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY?

well fuck that proves it for me mystery solved
psych turns out ive got all four prospitians on derse with me right now so how do you explain that one wise guy

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT? THERE'S FOURTEEN OF US ON PROSPIT. DERSE, TOO, AS FAR AS WE KNOW.

no its four and four fourteen is ridiculous how would you ever get anything done

WE DON'T, OBVIOUSLY. FOURTEEN IS TOO MANY. THE BEST WE CAN HOPE FOR IS A MAJORITY VOTE AND EVEN THAT'S A FUCKING STRUGGLE. LOOK, THIS IS ALL SO FAR BEYOND THE POINT RIGHT NOW. WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

not sure
rose thinks she might know and shes usually at least mostly right about shit
ps dont read anything into this because its just a physics question but my ring made it through the void without exploding or some shit right because yours is safe and sound on derse right now

IS *NOT SURE* THE BEST EXPLANATION YOU'VE GOT FOR WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW OR SHOULD I EXPECT A MORE INFORMATIVE UPDATE SOMETIME SOON?
P.S. YES, IT'S HERE, IN ONE PIECE, AND HAS BEEN LAUGHED AT ALMOST NON-STOP BY TEREZI FOR SIMPLY EXISTING.

no i told you rose has an idea but she cant prove it unless we do something about it so dirks trying to think of a way to do that something with the smallest risk of shit going downhill too fast
ps cool look after it for me im keeping yours safe and sound over here

WHAT'S HER IDEA?

stupid but probably right
okay dirk says hes got a plan for us to go over and if it goes the way him and rose think it will we should be able to solve this fucking mystery
ps see you soon
pps is that ok
ppps roxys about to pass out so if its not ok we wont know until its too late lmao

"I have a question," the Seer says. She raises her hand but goes on talking without waiting for Karkat to interrupt. "Which quadrant are you hoping he will fill for you? Because this guy seems like a total weirdo and that's kind of perfect for at least two of them."

"How addled is your ignorant think pan that you even remotely believe I'll deign to answer that insult of a question?" Karkat snaps.

In truth, there is no easy answer to that question for him to give, and it has been eating him alive for longer than he cares to remember.

"Boo," she huffs. "What the fuck is a Dirk?"

"He's the Prince of Derse."

"I had guessed that much already."

"Not a prince, the Prince."

"Oh, fuck," the Seer frowns. "Is he anything like ours?"

"I sincerely hope not," the Sylph interjects. She feels as if that is understating the matter, but the less said about the Prince of Prospit the better.

"What do you think he means by see you soon?" Terezi asks. She's sitting on the edge of Karkat's desk and has been for the last hour while the paper disappeared and reappeared beside her, both Knights adding additional messages each time it moved through the Void.

She would have described it as something close to adorable if Karkat hadn't been muttering comments laden with self-loathing to himself each time a new message arrived. He is a terrible troll; too soft, too in tune with his own emotions, to ever truly despise himself the way he thinks he does. She is not a particularly good Seer, but she can say, unequivocally, that for all of the Knight's endless speeches filled with loathing for himself and those around him, she does not think he is capable of true hatred.

Of course, she would never tell him that. It would only end painfully for the both of them. He punches hard, but she punches harder.

"I think it means that he intends to see us soon," Kanaya says in response to her question.

"Well, that's just some fantastic insight," Karkat says, then pauses, or at least he hesitates long enough it can be considered a pause for him. "Wait, do you really think so?"

"I am fairly certain that stating you will see someone soon implies that you intend to see them soon," the Sylph says. She is sitting comfortably in his reading chair, a safe distance away should he decide to hit someone or something.

And besides, his taste in readily available reading material is delightfully similar to her own.

"I'm going to throttle his ignorant windhole if that's something he could have just done any time in the last half an eternity at the drop of a fucking panlid," Karkat says as he pushes his chair away from his desk. "And how soon is soon? Are we talking minutes, or hours, or days? Does he mean he's coming here? To Prospit? Now? This is stupid, it's all so fucking stupid," he goes on, hands dragging dramatically down his face.

The Seer does not say anything as he stands up and begins to pace back and forth across his room; Kanaya glances up from skimming the back cover of a novel from the pile beside his chair, but does not interrupt him with a quip of her own, regardless of how close it is to escaping the tip of her tongue.

He does not know how much time passes.

Karkat, to his own detriment, has no idea what to do with the information that the Knight of Time could very well be on his way to Prospit. It is something that he has thought about before, thinks about regularly, a moment he would never admit he has dreamt about too often to track.

They have never defined the purpose of their exchange of letters. He cannot speak for the other but he has never wanted to define it, to give it a name or assign it a quadrant, because he wants to enjoy it for what it is: something ineffable, or inexplicable, that is theirs and theirs alone. It is something he wants, has always wanted and will always want, explicitly because of just how it is so different to anything he has known before.

Not to mention, as far as he knows, it is highly illegal on both Prospit and Derse. If he defines it, it becomes real and tangible and something he could so easily lose.

He does not want to lose it, even if he does not know exactly what it is.

Terezi's head jerks suddenly to the window of his tower. There is a scent in the air she has never smelt before and cannot place.

She sniffs again.

Karkat is on the far side of his room when she shrieks, the noise as grating to his ears as it is unexpected. He turns, the alarm written on his face as clear as day because Terezi does not shriek.

There are two additional bodies standing in his room that were not there mere seconds before.

Karkat slumps back against the wall and sinks down to the floor, his head dropping between his knees.

"Holy shit, is he having a fucking panic attack?"

Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

"Oh, that is so gross."

The Heir, his nose wrinkling in distaste at the pool of blood seeping into the Archagent's office carpet, evaporates into the Breeze then rematerialises six feet away from Dirk.

When the Prince had explained the first step of the plan, he mentioned that he would be incapacitating the Archagent. He did not, however, seem to think that it was of any importance to inform the Prospitian Royals that incapacitate was obviously intended to mean behead.

John suddenly understands why the Maid has been brought with them to the Archagent's office.

"What?" Dave asks. He nudges the Archagent's head with the toe of his boot. "You've never seen someone's face totally independent of their body before?"

"Is that a normal thing to see on Derse?" The Witch asks.

Her tone implies that it is absolutely not a normal thing to see on Prospit.

Dave pauses. He wouldn't say that it is entirely normal to see beheaded corpses on Derse. But it isn't entirely abnormal, either, because he has seen Dirk without his head attached more than half a dozen times over the years, and has been responsible for all but one of those beheadings himself.

He does not like the blood that comes along with such brutality, finds that so much of it unsettles his stomach. But he does not pass out at the mere sight of it when it belongs to someone else. Not anymore.

That is only a recent development in his existence.

But he does not say any of that out loud because the Maid looks ill and the Heir hasn't touched the ground since the Archagent fell, and they need both of them alert and at their full capacity for the plan to succeed.

Dave has not let himself think about how much he needs the plan to succeed.

"Not really," he says instead, to answer Jade's question. He crouches beside the Fenestrated Plane he cracked upon first entering the office and picks up his dagger from the floor. He flips the blade in his hand as he stands back up then uses the pommel to break the rest of the glass in the top left quadrant of the Plane, clearing away the shards as best he can.

"How long until you can't bring him back?" Dirk asks the Maid.

"I'm not exactly sure," Jane says. There is a small frown of concentration on her face as she thinks back over all the revivals she has done throughout her unending life. "Minutes. Maybe ten, fifteen at a push."

"We can work with that," the Prince says. "Let's go. John, catch," he adds, as he throws a coiled rope to the Heir. "Tie the body to the chair. You can leave the head on the floor if you don't want to touch it and I'll get it when I'm back."

"You guys are so weird," John says as he gingerly reaches out with a foot to push the Archagent's body upright; he fails, and the corpse falls sideways over the arm of its chair. "Unless it's just Derse that's weird, which makes you guys seem weird by default?"

"When was the last time any of you died?" Dirk asks. He moves fast enough to catch the Archagent's shoulders before the body can fall to the floor and repositions the Carapacian, gesturing for the Heir to pass the rope back.

"Uh," John thinks for a moment. "Jake ate some peanuts a while back but there was way less blood when that happened. Jane made him sleep it off because he really wanted to try peanut butter, so it was his own fault."

Dirk loops the rope around the Archagent several times and ties him firmly to the chair.

"Fuck Prospit sounds boring," he says. "Okay. Keep the door locked. I'll be right back," he adds, then turns to Dave. "Ready?"

Dave nods, even though he has never felt less ready for anything in his unending life. But instead of saying that, or simply running away, he lifts a few inches off the floor and looks to the Witch.

"Ladies first?"

"Why? Are you scared?" Jade grins widely as she floats up beside him.

"I'm fucking terrified," he says, a small frown on his face. "You're not the one with a head full of dreams about the Horrorterrors every other night."

"Are they really that bad?"

The Witch reaches out a hand and passes it beyond the frame of the Archagent's Fenestrated Plane. It is cold, and vast, and she is entirely unsure if her abilities will work as she intends once they are entirely at the mercy of the Furthest Ring.

It is the most excited she has been about anything in a very long time.

"They're called the fuckin' Horrorterrors," Dave says flatly. "What do you think?"

He takes a deep breath, steeling himself for the unknown of the next few moments, and plunges himself headfirst through the shattered pane of glass.

It is a darkness unlike anything he has known before.

The Witch follows him through the Archagent's Fenestrated Plane, and she is followed in turn by the Prince.

Dave comes to a stop in mid-air what feels like it should only be feet from the entryway. But when he glances back towards the interior of the Plane it looks much further away, a sliver of light so small that he wouldn't believe anyone could fit through it if he hadn't just done exactly that.

He is still holding his newest dagger. He returns it to the scabbard on his belt and reaches over his shoulder for Caledfwlch, because, despite Rose's assumption that things will be fine, he would rather be prepared when facing the unknown.

When the Witch reaches out for his hand, he temporarily swaps the sword to his right so she can take his left; she is sure she could find the exit, eventually, but the Knight of Blood's signet ring still safe around Dave's little finger will help her to pinpoint exactly where they need to go without the otherwise countless decades of blind searching.

Once the link is established, they will be able to avoid traipsing through the Void and instead travel near instantaneously through the Planes.

But they have to find a way out first, and one that will take them where they need to go.

Dave feels a strange tugging sensation in all of his joints, all at once, as the Witch moves them through the unknowable emptiness of the Furthest Ring. It is as though he is being stretched and compressed both at the same time yet in opposing directions, and for eight hundred milliseconds it feels like his entire digestive tract is about to fall out of his ass.

"Now!" Jade shouts.

Time and Space have both simultaneously catch up with them and Dave struggles to lift his arm through the additional gravity from their sudden deceleration. But then there is a mighty crash that echoes through his entire being as Caledfwlch shatters another Plane, from the inside this time, and the Knight leads the Witch and the Prince in turn out of the Furthest Ring.

And into an office.

It is an office, Dave realises with a sinking sensation in his gut, identical to the one they have just left. He drops the Witch's hand and swaps his sword back to his left where it belongs, and it takes him almost three seconds to notice what should have been immediately apparent: the office is empty.

There is no Heir, and no Maid, and most obviously there is no headless Archagent sitting behind the desk as his blood seeps slowly into the carpet.

"Everything feels right," the Witch says slowly, her head cocked to one side as she lets Space settle around her. "But it feels wrong at the same time. It's hard to explain," she frowns. "It's Prospit, but not."

Behind her, Dirk disappears suddenly through the Fenestrated Plane without a word to either of them and the six and a half seconds he is gone are, Dave is sure, the most terrifying of his entire existence.

But then he is back, and before Dave can shout at him for abandoning them - abandoning him - the Prince of Heart moves to stand opposite him, less than an arm's length away.

"Go," Dirk says. "I'll head home and make sure the others are on top of the Noir situation, then come back and wait in here for you. How long do you want?"

Forever, Dave thinks. He wants forever, but he can't say that, not to himself and definitely not to Dirk.

"Ten minutes," he says instead. "We'll check in exactly ten minutes from when we leave."

If his voice wavers with any obvious hint of the roiling anxiety in his chest, Dirk lets it slide.

He is immeasurably grateful for that kindness.

"Go," the Prince repeats. He opens a door that leads onto a balcony and makes a gesture with one hand, as if he is shooing them both away like a pair of pigeons that have found their way into his tower.

Dave wants to thank him but knows he wouldn't accept it, not when the plan is still in motion and while things could still go so very wrong. So instead he takes the Witch's hand again and leads her out onto the balcony, then into the air, where he turns them around until he finds what he is looking for in the distance.

Prospit is a mere glimpse of gold on the horizon, by Skaia, so small that had he not known where to look it would have easily been missed.

The view is identical to the way he remembers it; it is a view seared into his memory, because even he cannot track all the minutes he has spent staring at the golden planet.

He lost count somewhere after three million.

Jade squeezes his hand with hers. She lifts up her left and aligns Prospit in her sights, closes one eye to make sure she is right, opens it, then closes the other.

"Ready?" The Witch asks.

"Ready," the Knight confirms.

The stretching of his joints is far less painful this time; he assumes it is because they are travelling such a short distance compared to their trip through the Furthest Ring.

He wants to take his ready back at the first twinge of Space-shifting related pain in his right elbow, because he suddenly has no idea why he agreed to a plan headed by Dirk and Rose, a plan that has no real basis to work out the way they say it will. But before he has even finished the thought, it is too late to take his words back because he and Jade are standing in a room that looks very similar to his own.

They are greeted by a screech.

Then someone is laughing. It is a grating noise that hurts his ears but he does not care, cannot care, because he is on Prospit, fucking Prospit, and the Knight must be close. He has to be close this time, cannot be anywhere else, cannot be the shape hunched over on the floor with a dark head of hair dropped between his knees.

Dave knows that feeling all too well.

"Holy shit, is he having a fucking panic attack?"

The tight sensation that grips his blood pusher is only compounded by the sound of an unfamiliar voice in his tower, because despite it being one he has not heard before he knows, immediately, inherently, who it belongs to, even though it should be impossible.

Every noise is too loud. The clatter of weaponry hitting what has to be the only spot in the room where rugs do not cover the hardwood floor. The footsteps that come closer then move further away, then disappear altogether. The soft thunk of a weightless body leaning too roughly against a wall.

The louder thunk of that same body sliding down to the floor beside him.

"So my Queen says I can come over, but only if your Queen says it's okay," the Knight of Time says. There is a hint of humour in his voice almost entirely obscured by the much more obvious writhing anxiety lacing his every word. "That's a joke," he adds, when Karkat cannot bring himself to look up. "She's totally gonna have me straight up murdered, like, on repeat for a fuckin' week and yeah I guess I'd probably deserve it because being here isn't even the most heinously illegal of shit I've done today, not by a long shot. Especially not when I got put down a week ago because I was wearing the loudest shoes this side of the Furthest Ring, or like, the other side of the Furthest Ring I guess because that's where this shit started and, fuck, you're gonna have to stop me eventually because I'm in no way actually prepared to be here, you know, and then there's the fact that yeah, I'd mostly got my head around the idea of an alternate Prospit because sure, why not, but I hadn't considered that alternate Prospit might not be filled by fuckin' humans? And shit, call me as dumb as a bag of rocks here if you want but I guess that explains all the shit I always thought was just some kind of Prospitian local dialect type vocabulary and if you could maybe use some of that vocabulary right now, particularly the words that basically mean hey Dave, shut the fuck up holy shit, that would be fantastic."

The Knight of Time stops, seemingly just to take a breath, because after the briefest of pauses he is talking again. He mentions the Furthest Ring, and his sword, and the other Dersites that he recognises by name or title. There is something about blood, and a beheading, and then just when the faint but ominous sound of ticking is beginning to creep up on his final nerve, Karkat manages to lift his head from between his knees and look, for the first time, at the prince from Derse he has been writing to, waiting for, more than some kind of in love with, for so long.

And all he can do is stare.

"What the fuck is wrong with your face?"

The Knight of Blood cannot prevent the comment from escaping, not when the Knight of Time is as inexplicably pale as a rainbow drinker.

Whatever he is, he is very obviously not a troll.

"Hi," the other Knight says, more quietly than before, his voice once again dripping with that crushing anxiety.

"Does that noise just follow you around to impede any and all enjoyment of your no doubt pathetic existence?" Karkat asks snidely, painfully aware of the overt yet weak pitch implication in his tone.

"The ticking?" Dave asks. His head is leaning back against the wall as he looks at something outside the window. "Or the incessant horseshit that just falls outta my mouth? Because I can only control one of the two and the answer to which one might surprise you."

"The ticking," he confirms.

"I can turn it off," Dave says slowly. "But only once I start the clock again."

"What do you mean?"

"I stopped Time," he says, as if it were the most normal thing he could have said as he forces himself to look away from the window. "You were down here having a fucked up panic attack and I knew I was gonna say too much stupid shit, and considering there's only eight minutes and twelve seconds left before me and Jade have to get back or else we're fucked, it seemed like a good time to flex this particular party trick."

"You stopped Time?" Karkat repeats in disbelief. "You stopped Time itself just so you could monologue in my general direction without running down your eight minute counter?"

"Yeah, pretty much," the Knight admits with a shrug that is far too casual for such an overreaching use of power. "I don't do it very often, not like this, but it's definitely something I can do. And I've only ever brought one other person along with me before now."

"You stopped Time."

"Check it out if you don't believe me."

It is only when Dave makes his suggestion that Karkat realises he has not looked anywhere but directly at him since he first managed to lift his head.

Everything, everything, is exactly as it was when the Knight of Blood first sunk down to the floor in an attempt to prevent his own heart from working double time. The Sylph sits motionless in his reading chair, a page of his current novel frozen mid-turn in her fingers; if he wanted to, he would be able to work out exactly where on the page she has read to by her line of sight. Across the room, the Seer is a statue carved mid-laugh still perched on the edge of his desk.

Slowly, so slowly, he stands and stares at the other stranger who is pale like the Knight but dressed in the yellow and gold of Prospit. There is a sense of familiarity in that, at least, and in the insignia that appears on each decorative button he can see.

"Space," he says, in something like a murmur.

"She fucks with Space, yeah," Dave says. "I don't know how it works but she just kind of, you know," he trails off, but mimes an explosion with his fingers that comes complete with the requisite sound effect. "It ain't none of my business to know exactly how it works."

The Knight of Time is standing alongside him by then, hands in his pockets, trying yet failing to make the concept of stopping Time seem like something mundane.

But Karkat already knows he does not use his powers lightly. The ability he has to bend Time itself to his will overwhelms him, is too much for him to handle, because it could so easily be abused or misused and too many things destroyed if his concentration falters and he does not want that responsibility. More than one of his letters from over the years points this out, just as it has been pointed out that he is not the only one of the Dersite Royals who could so easily change the fabric of reality if he was so inclined.

And yet, Dave has pushed aside all discomfort he has for his own Aspect to entirely pause the rest of the Incipisphere.

Incipispheres.

"What now?"

When the Knight of Blood asks the question, Dave cannot provide an answer.

There is no playbook. The plan only exists to get them to exactly this point and no further. Once he restarts the universe they have eight minutes and twelve seconds before Dirk will stop at nothing to get him home safely, and he does not need the Prince destroying whatever it takes to achieve that end.

It has taken the combined abilities of the Royals from both Prospit and Derse to get him here. A beheading of the only Carapacian who out-ranks him. Travel through the endless Void of the Furthest Ring. The most egregious misuse of his Time powers.

Time powers that he can feel eating away at the very core of his bones to control at such an outrageous scale.

"Come back with me," Dave says suddenly. "To Derse. My Derse."

It might not be the stupidest thing he has ever said but it certainly feels that way when the Knight of Blood looks at him as if it is, indeed, the stupidest thing he has ever said.

"That is the single most idiotic thing anyone, and I mean anyone, has ever said in all of Paradox Space," Karkat says as he turns toward the Sylph and takes the novel from her hands. "Out of all the inane, useless, garbage that undoubtedly falls out of your squawk blister every single day, that has to take the fucking cake as the most idiotic utterance ever said this side of the Veil. Well?"

"Well what?"

Dave frowns as Karkat simply scowls at him from across the room.

"Start the fucking clock, genius."

The ticking stops.

Chapter Text

The Light Kingdom of Prospit, Skaia's Orbit

It is nearing dawn on Prospit's moon when the Sylph repeats the Knight's declaration back to him.

It has been a long night. Her questioning is intended to clarify the information for herself as much as it is to lay any seeds of doubt over his decision, but she knows him too well to believe that those seeds will ever grow.

She has been planting seeds for an eternity that his mind refuses to nourish.

"You are planning to leave not only Prospit, but this entire universe, with a strange creature you have only just met and are unsure when or how you will return?"

"Boys and their stupid ideas," the Seer scoffs, somewhat unnecessarily.

Jade cannot hide the laugh that escapes her, because she has shared the same sentiment with Jane countless times; between John and Jake it seems that not a day goes by without one or the other doing something incredibly stupid themselves. Or worse, together.

She wonders if it is the same on Derse.

"Human, by the way," Dave interjects. "In case you were, like, wondering or whatever. Technically he's leaving the universe with a couple of strange humans who fast-tracked a trip through the Furthest Ring to get here. The more you know, right?"

"Shut the fuck up," Karkat says on instinct. Immediately upon the words falling out of his protein chute he remembers he is not speaking to the Seer or even to the Mage, and awkwardly shoots the Knight of Time an apologetic look that he knows even Terezi sees is full of an embarrassing fondness he cannot disguise. "Two days," he says to the Sylph. "Two days, and if I'm not back by then you can straight up tell the Queen herself I broke every fucking law in the book and kick off an inter-universal war to force me back."

"This feels incredibly reckless," Kanaya says as he moves in to let her envelop him in her arms. "Do not die," she says quietly, the warning intended for Karkat and Karkat alone. "You do not have my permission to die."

Her comment is made in jest but he knows that she is entirely serious. If it were up to the Sylph, he would remain safely on Prospit, safely in his tower, safely under her smothering watch for the rest of his eternal life. But for all of her doting and desperation to protect him from harm or hurt, she cannot compel him to do anything he does not want to do.

The Knight of Blood is not the most powerful of the Royals, but he outranks them all, and is second only to the White King and Queen of Prospit.

"Don't let Terezi fuck up my room," he replies from where he is trapped in her tight embrace.

"You know she cannot promise that," the Seer scoffs, from a distance that should have afforded the Knight and the Sylph a private goodbye.

She is, however, standing unnervingly close to the Knight of Time and the Witch of Space as she surreptitiously sniffs them both, blissfully ignorant to the confused looks on their faces.

"Ninety seconds," Dave says suddenly, and Karkat finds their embrace cut short as Kanaya holds him at arm's length.

"You've waited a very long time for this, haven't you?"

All he can do is nod curtly in reply when she attempts to brush a lock of hair back from his face. It is a gesture that, coming from anyone else, could easily be misinterpreted as pale flirtation but he understands that her intentions are, always have been, more akin to a Mother Grub.

"I don't know if I'll ever be able to come back," the Witch says brightly as she takes Dave's hand to prepare for the necessary jump back to the alternate Derse. "But I like your Prospit and I wish I could explore it and see what stuff is different!"

"Ours is way cooler," Terezi says, pressing buttons that do not need to be pressed.

"Go," the Sylph says as she releases Karkat from her grasp. "At the risk of sounding far too much like an overbearing lusus, we expect him back alive and well two days from now," she adds to the human delegation.

Dave nods solemnly and gives her a small salute in response. He tries his best to make it seem like a serious gesture, but it is something he and Roxy use as a signal when shenanigans are afoot and he can only hope that this time, in this universe, it comes across as sincere.

When Jade instructs the Knight of Blood to take his other hand for the jump across the Incipisphere, Dave feels his heart skip a beat the same way it does when severed from his femoral artery by a dagger.

But the Knight's hand is warm, and real, and that makes all the difference.

Then suddenly, once again and without further warning, Space attempts to rip him apart one joint at a time.

The Black Queen sits on her throne, fingernails tapping on one arm while she waits impatiently for the Prince to start speaking. He is trying her patience, as he always does, but she is begrudgingly curious to find out what he has to say; historically, he has not pressed her for an audience so early in the morning.

Nor is he one to wait until his presence is announced before entering the Great Hall of Derse, clad head to toe in his most formal regalia, the Unbreakable Katana hanging from his hip.

She is always suspicious of the Prince, cannot recall a single day of his existence passing by when he has not said or done something to justify her scrutiny of his every action. But this, his absolute adherence to formality and royal protocol, is so disconcerting that as he drops to one knee in front of the dais she cannot contain the deep snarl that escapes her lips.

He does not rise, does not take the bait, and while she would like to find out how long he would wait for her command, she gives the word less than a minute later and allows him to return to his feet.

Feet that, she notices, are enclosed in freshly polished boots.

Suck up.

She asks him what he wants and he takes his time responding. He is methodical and thorough and she wants to deny him his every request on principle, because he is, and always will be, nothing but a continual thorn in her side with far too little opportunity to flex his full ambition.

He will fight endlessly for what he wants though, so she makes him work for it.

I know what you did to the Archagent, she says to the Prince who does not even have the decency to feign surprise. He would have been disappointed if she didn't already know about that little incident, he argues in response. They go back and forth, rapid fire, the Queen dancing around the point he is trying to make each time he tries to steer the conversation back to the course he has predetermined as ideal to achieve his intended outcomes.

But when all is said and done and she has grown tired of their verbal sparring match, the Queen gives a dramatic sigh and begins to negotiate a deal with the Prince to get him out of her sight.

She is not a truly benevolent ruler as much as she is a bored one.

Eternity is a very long time, Prince, she says. You're telling me, he replies.

The Black Queen raises a hand and the doors to the Great Hall creak slowly open.

The Prince bows deeply.

He has been dismissed.

There are very few places on Derse that provide any semblance of privacy. While this is most often the case because one or more of the Royals are actively snooping on each other, or because they are leading Agents on a wild goose chase, it is still next to impossible to spend any time alone.

Usually this is something that Dave finds comforting. He does not like being alone, craves company from the others almost all of the time, needs it to feel sane. It is their mere presence he wants rather than anything of them; he will gladly spend hours cleaning and rearranging his blades while Rose reads across the room, or Dirk plays himself at chess, or Roxy runs network maintenance. They are always there, have always been there, and will always be there.

But right now, in this moment, he can only hope they do not come searching.

He knows that his own tower provides little in the way of true privacy, but there is a door that closes and a large distraction in the form of the four Prospitian Royals, the ones from this universe, at the breakfast table.

Dave leans back against the inside of his door, and it latches with a soft click that he only just hears over the still rapid beating of his heart.

He has half a mind to stop it himself, to run Caledfwlch through his own chest so that the muscle can finally, finally, rest; it has not stopped working overtime since the moment he first felt the Knight of Blood's hand in his, exactly forty-two minutes and thirty-eight seconds earlier, and he would rather face the embarrassment of passing out at the sight of his own blood in the brief, blissful seconds before death than admit to that.

The fact they are, for the first time, truly alone, is something that Dave only realises when Karkat places the book he has brought from Prospit down, on the edge of his desk, and turns to face him.

Slowly, so slowly, he moves one hand and locks the door behind him.

"You haven't fucked with Time again, have you?" Karkat asks with a frown, standing in the middle of the room with his arms folded over his chest.

He has, of course, just watched Dave lock the door with them inside, and has no way of knowing what is happening elsewhere.

"No chance," Dave replies. He is grateful for the invitation to fill the silence before it starts eating him alive. "Everyone else's gone to get some breakfast in since we've gotta get all our shit sorted for some bullshit fancy-ass goodbye to the Prospit gang later this morning," he explains. "They're back over the bridge and down a level, that's why you can't smell the shit that's burning on account of no one around here knowing how to even cook their own toast without fucking it up."

He would continue to talk absolute horseshit for the rest of his eternal life if it meant the Knight kept looking at him the way he currently is; it is a combination of perplexed, pissed off, and somewhat amused all at the same time.

"So are we going to talk about how you can apparently stop Time in any and all universes at once? Because I don't think you've ever explicitly fucking stated you can figuratively annihilate the concept of a clock across multiple planes of existence simultaneously and at will, because that seems like something you probably should have mentioned by now."

"Uh, yeah, we can talk about that if you want, I guess," he shrugs. "But I won't be doing it again anytime soon. If I wasn't so fuckin' wired from everything else that's happening right now I'd be all tucked in for a nap already, because sure, I can stop Time if I want but I'm gonna pay for it later with some janky aches and pains and a hell of an extended night's sleep, you know?"

"No," Karkat says, and blinks. "How the flying fuck would I know that?"

"Oh, yeah," Dave replies, feeling like a fucking idiot as the words fall from his mouth.

He remembers the first time he read a letter from the other Knight describing his Aspect. He'd described Time in a previous missive as something malleable, as if all of the past and the future were playing like a movie he could pause at will. Time could move faster, or slower, or not at all. But Blood was more subtle. It did not simply flow like Time but instead leeched from one individual to the next, then the next, and so on. It was a series of connections that the Knight could see but not manipulate, and influence only slightly.

Dave is still standing with his back to the door and he feels stupid for it, but cannot think of where else to stand or what else he could do that would feel any less stupid.

"It hurts to stop Time?" Karkat prompts him to go on.

"Yes and no," Dave answers as he searches for the right words to explain the sensation. "Insignificant shit like slowing myself down so I don't do anything heinously offensive in front of the entire Court doesn't phase me at all, because I'm not exactly changing the clock, I'm just altering my own perception of it, right? But doing what I did before on a totally cosmic scale comes with this delayed onset of, like, imagine the worst headache you've ever had but it's buried deep in the marrow of your bones," he explains, then pauses. "Do you even have marrow in your bones?"

"No, my bones are filled with boiling hot piss that I can defensively spray from my joints on command," Karkat says, eyes rolling. "What do you think?"

"Dude, I only just found out like an hour ago that you're apparently not even human, give me some time to think up a non-offensive question or six about it," Dave snaps in response. "That's bullshit, right?"

"Do you really want to find out?"

If Karkat has learnt anything about the Knight of Time from the countless letters they have exchanged in the past, it's that Dave would absolutely jump at the chance to prove his hypothetical bullshit false by following the hypothetical bullshit trail to its logical extreme and beyond.

So instead of egging him on any further, and risking the conversation turning any more pitch than it is already swaying, he sighs heavily and sits down on the end of Dave's bed.

He pats the space next to him in a way that could be so easily explained away as an attempt to flatten a crease in the rumpled sheets of the unmade bed if needed, and Dave just cocks his head suspiciously in response.

"You wouldn't drench me in bone piss in my own room, would you?"

"Only if you ask nicely."

Dave snorts in response, but finally pushes himself off the door.

When he sits down, he perches himself sideways with one leg folded in and the other hanging off the end of his bed. The ball of his foot bounces on the floor, non-stop, ideally positioned so that he can easily shift his weight and fly across the room if his nerves get the better of him. When his nerves inevitably get the better of him.

He does not get the chance to even consider launching himself as far as possible from what he thinks is about to happen before the Knight of Blood has those warm hands on him again, on both of his cheeks this time. Then, without any warning beyond moving in close enough that Dave's eyes cross trying to follow his movement, presses lips to his, so, so softly that he cannot be entirely sure there is enough contact between them to even be called a kiss.

Dave, with his own hands hovering awkwardly between the two of them, mimics the motion, just as slowly, after what he hopes is not too long of a pause but entirely sure that no matter how soft it is, this time it is definitely a kiss.

And when Karkat moves one hand down to his chest, over the still-healing scar from the incident a week earlier, then pushes him back just far enough to prevent the definite kiss from lingering, Dave cannot help but feel as if he has, somehow, fumbled the catch at first base.

"So it was that bad, huh?"

He is joking, but his stomach feels tight as a wave of nausea washes over him, so strongly, that the back of his neck prickles with a cold sweat.

"No," Karkat says gently, more gently than he expects. "It was fucking perfect, you pasty, hornless imbecile."

"So why are we still yapping here?" Dave asks. He figures out what to do with one hand and wraps his fingers loosely around Karkat's wrist, the one still resting against his own chest. The other, he simply drops into his lap. "Does perfect mean the totally opposite thing on your Prospit or something? Because here on good old Derse, saying that shit was perfect kinda implies you'd wanna do it again, and hopefully sometime real soon."

"We're still yapping," Karkat says, his fingertips pressing in against Dave's chest as if he plans to grab a handful of the deep purple fabric. Dave kind of hopes he does, and soon. "Because if it was that fucking perfect, then it means you're leaning red over black, aren't you? But I keep thinking we have to be black over red because of all the endless garbage we write to each other that's just riddled with blatant pitch innuendo and despite the fact that I want us to be red so fucking badly, I'll take black over nothing if that's all I can get."

The Knight of Blood has a strange look on his face that reads as if he's said something deeply and embarrassingly personal and Dave has no idea how to tell him that he hadn't understood a word of it.

"So rumour has it that this guy right here has a solid one hundred percent eternal lifetime streak of giving perfect kisses," he says instead.

Like the pasty, hornless imbecile he evidently is.

"See?" Karkat says, and his eyes narrow in some kind of warning that Dave cannot interpret without the six pages, back and front, of context he is used to from the Knight. "Are you actively trying to piss me the fuck off or what?"

"No way," Dave says, with mild alarm. "Like, not to ruin the moment any more than I already have here, but can we run through the sequence of events that just occurred here less than a minute ago? Because from where I'm sitting, you got all touchy feely up in my face, dropped what's got to be history's most cautious kiss on me, got an equally lame yet somehow perfect one back, then started going on about different colours? I'm confused in ways I didn't think I'd ever get confused over a couple of kisses so chaste they don't even fall on the worth bothering with list for those guys who give ratings to movies."

Karkat makes a noise of frustration and drops both hands from Dave, shaking off the fingers from around his wrist so that he can use both hands to drag down his own face.

"You're going to make me ask it, aren't you?"

He asks the question, feeling like a wiggler with his first crush, from behind his hands where it somehow feels ever so slightly less shitty to act like a wiggler facing his first crush.

His first crush was a long time ago.

"I have no idea what you're gonna ask," Dave says, honestly. "And yeah, I mean, we never exactly defined what we are, or what was going on with the whole perpetual cross-planetary penpal thing we've been doing for at least a century now, give or take, but you kind of have to assume it's something after that long, right? Even if it's something you never thought you'd get to act on it's still something, and now we're here and yeah, I want it to be something, so fucking bad. Shit, I mean," he trails off.

"I need to know," Karkat says. His hands drop from his face and he just stares at Dave, so intensely that the Knight of Time almost does launch himself across the room to escape that stare. "This is so stupid, fuck. We need to define it, because that dictates what happens next. Now. From now. Fuck."

Dave desperately wants to make a joke about Karkat's use of the word dictate, but has just enough self-control to keep it in.

"So, you're saying we're something?"

"Do you want a matesprit or a kismesis?"

Whatever response Karkat has been imagining, for so many neverending years, to such a disgustingly upfront question he has only otherwise read in the trashiest of romance novels, it is not for Dave to simply shake his head with that absurd, confused grin plastered on his face.

"I still have no fucking idea what you're talking about," he says. "Are those Prospit words or not-human words? I'm gonna level with you here, whenever you use a word I've never heard before I always just assume it's a Prospit thing, but now we're here and I'm kinda questioning my own intelligence on like eight previously undiscovered levels."

For all of their correspondence, Karkat has never explained quadrants because he never assumed it was something that needed explaining. The look on Dave's face, confusion laced with an expectation for more information, has him feeling a wave of pity that flushes, too inconveniently, pale.

"Fuck," he mutters.

"Hey," Dave says, and then there is a tentative hand on his cheek and fingers buried in the front of his tunic, a mirror to their earlier position. "Humans are dumb as dog shit, everyone knows that, and I'm probably dumber than most. Or like, maybe it just seems like that because everyone else around here is so fuckin' smart that I seem like an idiot in comparison, I dunno, but that's a whole other issue for another day, right?"

His hands are warm, and so much softer than his own.

"I'm very fucking aware of your untapped levels of idiocy at this point," Karkat says.

"Right? But anyway, to get to the fucking point, I honestly don't give a shit what this is or what you want to call it as long as we can agree that it's something, because I really fucking want this to be something," he says, more quietly than before. "I cannot fuckin' tell you in anything less than a rambling eighteen page letter how much of a something this is to me."

This time it is Dave who leans in first, one hand moving just far enough from his cheek so his fingers curl into the hair at Karkat's nape as he presses a soft kiss to his mouth, just like the first kiss from three minutes and eighteen seconds earlier. Then another, just as slow but more sure this time, and another, more sure again, before Karkat manages to recover enough control over himself to return the kiss in kind.

It is everything Karkat has always wanted it to be and more, because this is definitely red, it's so red, and he can feel himself smiling in a way he would not let anyone on Prospit see him smile.

He would be mocked mercilessly for it by Terezi, has been for far less, but he cannot bring himself to care.

"Fuck," Dave mumbles, suddenly, but still so close that Karkat feels the words against his own lips more than he hears them. "I'm so sorry."

"For what?"

Dave presses a final kiss to the corner of Karkat's mouth before he reluctantly pulls away, ending what has been a wholly perfect two minutes and eight seconds of nothing but shared kisses, and glares over the shoulder of the Knight of Blood, at the source of the interruption.

He should have known that a locked door would not keep the Prince out for long.

"What he should be apologizing for is the simple fact I was halfway through the window before he even heard me coming. Shit's mad embarrassing, yo."

Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

They know.

They all fucking know.

Dave stands tall behind the couch in the living room, arms folded over the ornate embroidery of his formal tunic, his position chosen entirely so that it is impossible for Rose to catch his eye without directly turning around to face him.

It was bad enough that Roxy just so happened to be exiting her room as he left his own. She did not say anything about the mottled flush creeping up his neck, or the fact that he almost tripped on the hem of his cape. The way she fell into step beside him, shit-eating grin slapped on her face, and bumped his upper arm with her shoulder said it all.

News travels fast on Derse, even without the help of the papers.

He might actually sacrifice himself to the Horrorterrors this time if there is so much as a byline about it in the evening edition of The Enquiring Carapacian.

"Look at the fidgety Prospit fucker," a voice says from over his shoulder.

It takes every ounce of willpower he can find to prevent himself from hitting the roof.

The Knight of Blood is airborne, hovering just far enough from the floorboards so he can mutter directly into Dave's ear.

"Which one?"

"On the floor."

The Page of Hope. He is the only one of them all sitting on the floor, looking far more comfortable sprawled there than he has on any furniture over the last twenty three hours. His eyes dart around the room, from Prospitian to Dersite to blank TV, back to Dersite and around again, never stopping or lingering for long.

"Jake," Dave replies in a mumble. "Weird dude, and you know that means hells of something coming from me."

"I don't give a fuck," Karkat says dismissively. His attempt at keeping the conversation between the two of them has failed already; Dave knows by the tilt of her head that Rose is taking in every word. "He was with your Prince."

"What."

It isn't a question, not yet, because Dave needs a moment to decide what he should even ask because he does not want to go prying into Dirk's private life, something that could so easily become the last thing he ever does. But as he hesitates, sorting through the dozens of thoughts that are beginning to take the shape of questions in his mind, the Seer's head snaps around so suddenly that the ends of her own blunt bob threaten to poke her in the eye.

"When?"

"Rose," Dave says, voice as low and threatening as he can manage, which is not at all, as far as she is concerned. The fingers of his left hand tighten on the pommel of Caledfwlch, and he is unsure why; but it makes him feel better, in control of something even when his thoughts are racing.

"What exactly did they do?" Rose presses.

"Do I look like a fucking Seer to you?"

"No, you do not," she says. Looks him up and down, an entirely judgemental gesture she does not even attempt to hide. "But it would be delightful to have the upper hand on our very own Prince charming for once. At least, until he discovers that we're aware of his dalliance and he unleashes his most pompous look of disappointment."

"That's all I can tell you. Take it or leave it, or don't, or shove it up your nook for all I care," Karkat says with a scowl and Dave, despite his best efforts, gives a snort of laughter at the brazenly dismissive comment he does not entirely understand.

He feels a hand on the small of his back then, a light touch that sweeps across his spine, and he falls so still that he briefly wonders if he has accidentally halted Time, the ability still a hairpin trigger on his fingertips after such a monumental use of the power overnight. But it is only an incidental touch, a steadying one, as Karkat drops back to the floor beside him now that there is no reason to attempt keeping the conversation private.

It is a hand that has written him dozens, hundreds, countless letters. One that he knows now is warmer than his own, a strange alien blood running underneath skin covered in calluses from an eternal life of wielding a scythe. Yet it is a hand that, somehow, is still far more gentle than he would have expected, had been imagining, has imagined, for years, from all he knows about the Knight.

It is a hand where his own Dersite signet ring now apparently belongs because it is still there, for safekeeping, a fact that is endlessly more embarrassing than knowing he was the one who made the swap first and sent it through the Void.

He has no idea if such an exchange means anything on the alternate Prospit.

It is a hand he feels on his cheek again, like before, but there are no excruciatingly soft touches this time. The hand slaps him, suddenly, and once again Dave has failed to see an obvious ambush coming.

"First of all, what the fuck was that? Not cool," he frowns, rubbing at what is probably the lightest injury he has ever received.

"So maybe open your hear ducts and pay attention when someone is blabbing in your general direction next time," Karkat says defensively. "That didn't hurt."

He's right, because it was definitely more of a hard pat than a real slap, but he would rather commit to the bit than give up while he's ahead.

"It hurt my fuckin' feelings is what it did."

"No, it hurt your ego," Rose interjects, and Dave flips her off.

"You're one to talk about ego," he scoffs. "Biggest head in all of Paradox Space over here."

"I'm begging you both to finally go at it to the death," Dirk interrupts, suddenly standing where he wasn't half a second earlier; he has evidently been waiting for the most dramatic moment to enter the room. "Last one standing is officially pronounced superior to the other in every way that matters and half the ways that don't."

"You know that's not a fair fight," Dave frowns. "She wields distance weapons."

"Then obviously we don't even need the fight to discover the outcome," the Seer says, her smug smile disappearing from view as she finally turns back around on the couch.

"Don't make me decree it, so help me I will publish a fuckin' ad and make you duke it out on Main Street," Dirk goes on, and if looks alone could kill Dave would already be six feet under. "John, get up here."

The Heir floats across the room in what could be called a scramble if he ever touched the ground, always the Prospit goody two-shoes who assumes he is in some kind of trouble despite holding an official rank equal to that of the Prince.

Dave wishes desperately to be back in his tower again, not only because he cannot possibly deal with one of Dirk's pretentious speeches after pulling an all-nighter, but because he is not entirely convinced he can survive much longer without the Knight of Blood's hands on him again; the slap will tide him over, but not for long.

"Oh my God, spit it out already!"

It is Roxy who breaks first, forever and always too impatient to put up with Dirk's theatrics for any longer than strictly necessary.

"As the old saying goes, good things come to those who wait," is all he says in reply, before pausing, this time obviously just to get under her skin. Roxy cracks her knuckles against the arm of the couch, a response all of its own that makes clear just how much she would love to punch him in the face.

Because she would desperately love to punch him in the face, just for fun, has done exactly that more than a few dozen times in the past. She's fast, but he's faster, so it's all that much more satisfying on the rare occasions she does manage to catch him. Not to mention that despite his speed far outstripping her own, she hits harder than anyone else on Derse.

"Fun fact, did you know that the first person who ever said that is still totally miserable?"

To his credit, John manages to interject at just the right time, with a comment just jokey enough and a genuine grin on his face, that Dirk lightly punches him in the upper arm and even, almost, just barely, cracks a smile of his own.

Which, in reality, means that the left corner of his lip quirks upwards in an almost discernible way. Almost.

Dave is sure that John will make a fantastic friend.

"I took the liberty of arranging a meeting with the Queen this morning," Dirk says, finally getting to the fucking point in the most horrific way possible. "And I have a message to pass on to all of you chucklefucks."

"Which Queen?" John asks.

"Black, but White is in agreement," he goes on. "For the next year, seven out of eight people in this room bestowed with a royal title are free to move between Prospit and Derse, a few minor conditions aside."

"Jiminy Christmas!"

Karkat elbows him in the side when the Page sits bolt upright on the floor, and Dave nudges him back despite still being unsure how much longer he can keep his hands to himself.

"Jiminy Christmas indeed," Dirk mimics without any of the Page's enthusiasm. "The main condition is that no planet is to be left without a representative for any amount of time. That won't be a problem for us. On Prospit, it can be any of you, as long as there is one left behind. The other condition is, and this is where it gets marginally more complex, that no official transport will be provided."

There are grins all around the living room as the news sinks in. Roxy is gripping the Maid's arm so tightly, beaming, as she realises that she does not need to say goodbye to her new best friend in less than an hour. John, unintentionally, sends a pulse of air through the room that is strong enough to ruffle clothing, as he grins widely.

"All aboard the Witch Express!" Jade exclaims loudly with a punch to the air.

"While that's most likely going to be our best transit option for the immediate future, we can't rely on that train forever," Dirk says. "That's why we need to find out how these two knuckleheads managed to accidentally send interdimensional mail back and forth for a century before anyone else realised."

When he nods in his direction, Dave feels that flush creeping up his neck again when at least three of the others also turn his way. He doesn't know why, has no idea why, cannot for the fucking life of him understand why he is so fucking embarrassed, beyond the fact that it is simply the way he is, about everything.

But he tries to play it cool, regardless.

"To be fair, I didn't know about the whole interdimensional aspect to this shit until twenty-two hours and thirty-eight minutes ago," he says, then corrects himself as the clock ticks over. "Thirty-nine minutes."

"The alien you brought home is a problem yet unsolved," Dirk says. "Hence the need to figure this shit out."

"Hey, fuck you and your pompous spinal crevice and the hoofbeast you rode in on," the Knight of Blood spits out, arms flailing in Dirk's direction. "Did you ever stop and consider, for even half a second inside that enormously overinflated thinkpan of yours, that maybe you're the alien species?"

"Yes, but as it turns out there's eight of us and only one of you."

"Well fuck me then, right?"

"Judging from the embarrassingly G-rated shit I unfortunately interrupted earlier, it'll be another hundred years before that happens."

Dave doesn't even make the decision to reach for the dagger, the one he took to the heart a week earlier, before the blade has already left his hand, and only then does the thought cross his mind that hurling a sharp weapon at the Prince is a terrible fucking idea.

But Dirk is fast, so much faster than him, that he catches the Archagent's dagger by the hilt - in his right fucking hand, no less - before it can embed itself into his shoulder.

"Oh, that was dumb as fuck, dude," Roxy snorts.

He has not yet had the opportunity to apologise, in whatever capacity manages to fall out of his ignorance shaft, for the slap. And the problem isn't even that he hasn't apologised for slapping the Knight of Time in the face, it's that when he finally gets the chance he won't know what to apologise for first.

It was never meant to be a slap.

There was a pinched look on Dave's face that had felt so familiar, so inherently familiar, that the only possible response was a gentle pap to the cheek. It was a far-off look, almost too preoccupied with the thoughts drifting in his mind that he needed a reassuring touch to bring him back to reality, to comfort, to reassure, to quiet those racing thoughts that Karkat knew, without asking, were there.

But a pap like that is not something to be done in public.

So, he simply added force while his hand was already in motion and turned the intimate gesture into a slap. It was a half-hearted slap, but definitely more of a slap than a pap, to save them both from the soul crushing embarrassment of pale flirting so openly, in front of so many people.

Most of the humans, fucking thankfully, choose to clear out when the Prince instructs them to leave for the Great Hall. Only the Knight of Time and the Heir of Breath remain, on his request, although the Page of Hope seems to take his time in following the Witch and the Maid out of the room.

The Prince crosses the room, sits down next to Dave on the couch, and holds out his dagger by the blade.

Dave takes it, flips it a few times in his hand.

"What shitty deal did you make with her?"

There is concern in the question, although he tries to disguise it; for whose benefit, Karkat is unsure.

"Elaborate," the Prince says.

"You said seven," Dave points out. "You wouldn't actually throw any of us under the bus no matter how many times you pull the old pretend to shove us into traffic move. What kind of whacked out bullshit did you agree to, dude?"

The Prince looks irritated by how easily Dave reads him. Dave does not seem to notice or care, or is simply too familiar with his ways to bother beating around the bush.

"It's a reasonable condition," Dirk says with a sigh. "I can't leave. Ever. To visit Prospit or otherwise. As my Prospitian counterpart, John has the choice to come and go as he pleases and so do the rest of you. That seems like a fair trade off to me, broski."

"Is that it? Planetary arrest?"

"An eternity on Derse? It could be worse," the Prince shrugs.

Karkat frowns. He stares intently at the Prince from across the room, where he sits in an armchair so similar to the one in his own room back on Prospit that he is almost tempted to examine the upholstery for grubsauce stains.

"Even you don't believe that utter hoofbeast shit," he says, inadvertently inserting himself into the conversation before being invited. "At all. And if you're not considering any kind of veritable marketing vis a vis believability, how long do you expect anyone else to buy it, dumbass?"

The Prince returns his stare and Karkat can feel it in his Soul, a stare that sees beyond his physical form and into the core of his being, deep inside his blood pusher. A nudge here, a prod there, and the Prince probably knows more about him than he knows himself.

Then, he does what is possibly the worst thing he can do: he entirely dismisses him.

"She knows we ventured into the Furthest Ring," Dirk says to Dave. "That we dragged the Prospitians from this plane of existence into a series of shenanigans and capers so wickedly exciting that they want to hang out with us, voluntarily."

"It's true, we took a vote," John interjects from where he floats, cross-legged in the air beside Karkat's chair. "And we all decided that we want to hang out with you again so voluntarily that we'd come back even if you didn't want us to."

"Is that considered stalking? Because it sounds like stalking, with a probable side of breaking and entering when you get here," Dave says.

"I don't think it counts if we tell you about it."

"Not to put a pin in this no doubt riveting semantic debate," Dirk interrupts before Dave can run the conversation into the ground. "But what the BQ doesn't know, as of now, is that we're harbouring a mouthy stowaway from an alternate Prospit who is so entrenched in your life that he can no longer be released into the wild."

"This is nothing, if you want mouthy I'll show you fucking mouthy," Karkat says. His fingernails dig into the plush arms of the chair, and the fabric gives way far too easily.

"I don't. What I'm saying is that you cannot, and let me stress this, cannot, leave Dave's tower without either of us unless you want to end up in the clink," Dirk says. "We're all due in the Great Hall in five minutes, and will be gone for an hour. I'm sure you can keep yourself out of trouble for that long. Then we're all sitting down to figure out your top secret mail route."

"Three and a half minutes," Dave corrects. "Until we're late."

"Then we better fuckin' skedaddle."

Dave knocks on his own door then enters slowly without really waiting for a response. He has somehow managed to make it through a formal gathering without earning himself another stab wound, although it was close at times. He was too distracted, too lost in his own head, too caught up in hows and what ifs to really focus on anything happening in the Great Hall.

The Archagent did not stop seething at him the entire time.

Two of the Prospitians left with the White Queen, the Heir and the Maid, with promises to visit within the week. The Witch and the Page have remained behind, as guests, free to come and go as they please but will be under continued surveillance and treated just like anyone else on Derse with a HRH title. Roxy has gone to Prospit with the others, the first of the Dersites to visit the golden planet, and for as much as it seemed to be her choice Dave could not help but notice the small nod she gave Dirk before she left.

She has evidently been sent on a fuckin' mission.

Dave freezes, in the midst of trying to wrestle off both of his boots simultaneously, when he realises why there has been no reaction to his appearance - the Knight of Blood is asleep, lying tangled in something like a nest made up of what must be all the blankets he owns, with the book brought from Prospit still between his fingers.

He abandons the futile attempt at removing the planet's most inconvenient boots in favour of perching himself on the edge of the mattress, and leans over with one hand on the other side of the Knight, and takes a moment to really look at him.

There is an obvious element of humanity to him, his general shape and form, but up close the differences are so innumerable that Dave feels like he could stare for hours without being able to find them all.

His skin, like the other two he briefly met on Prospit, is grey but in his sleep and warmed by no less than the six blankets Dave can count, his cheeks are flushed a shade of pink so deep it is almost red. He stirs, shifts to bury himself further into his makeshift nest. Pauses.

Dave could easily stop the hand that reaches for his throat. It shoots out from the blankets in what feels like slow motion, unsure how much of that is due to the Knight of Blood being still almost entirely asleep and how much is the frame of reference set by his own unnatural speed.

What he doesn't expect, however, is the sharp pinprick of alien fingernails pressing into his jugular.

"Hot," he says, voice as steady as he can manage.

"Really?"

"Absolutely fucking not," he scowls, and swats the hand away.

"You still pass out at the sight of it, don't you?"

Karkat looks almost amused at the thought.

"If it's gushing out of my neck, yeah, sure, any normal guy would hit the deck if he saw that much of his own blood falling outta his fuckin' body," Dave is reluctant to drop his scowl, not yet, so instead he reaches with his right hand, the one not supporting his weight and keeping him upright, to loosen his sword belt so that Caledfwlch falls to the floor with a resonating thunk.

"See, that, we can call that hot," the Knight of Blood says as he pushes himself up, out of his nest and directly into the Knight of Time's personal space.

"Really?"

"Absolutely fucking not," he says, just as blunt as Dave's comment had been moments earlier.

Dave is mid-laugh when Karkat leans even more into his space, and without saying anything else, kisses him. It is as soft and gentle as their first kiss, just short of two hours in the past, and he loves everything about it as much as he did then. He has imagined this so many times, whenever he was alone, while he was writing his letters to the Knight. In the middle of the night, waking from dreams of the Horrorterrors. In those brief moments of hyperawareness before a temporary death, over and over.

He has imagined far more than mere kisses.

It is difficult not to think about Time even though he is distracted in all the best ways, even as their kisses become deeper, more desperate, when those too sharp to be mistaken for human nails scrape lightly through his hair. There is a countdown tick, tick, ticking through the universe, even when his own fingernails, bitten right to the quick, brush lightly against Karkat's cheek, still warm from sleep, and he knows, in this moment more than ever, there is no going back.

He cannot go back to pen and paper.

It takes four minutes and thirteen seconds for Time to win, before Dave can, reluctantly, drag his mouth from Karkat's, and even then he barely convinces himself to do that.

So they sit, half in each other's laps, foreheads pressed together, as they catch their breath.

"Just F-Y-I," Dave starts, between gasps of desperately needed air. "This isn't an entirely voluntary stoppage because I'm telling you straight up I think we should do this and nothing but this for the next fucking century and yeah, I literally mean I'd be thrilled to just do this for a hundred years without even trying to get into your pants, but, oh, fuck, what's even in your pants? Oh my God, so not the point right now but fuck me I've never been more fuckin' curious about anything in my whole goddamn life than I am right now, an-"

Karkat shuts him up with another kiss, messier than the last, needier, hands brushing over his cheeks, his nape, fingers dipping in below the neckline of his formal tunic. Time slips away from him again, skips a second but repeats the next to make up for it, and, for as much as that catches his attention, dragging himself away is even harder than it was the first time.

"You lying sack of shit, that was not a hundred fucking years," the Knight of Blood says, breathless, trying to follow as Dave moves just out of reach.

"Did you just try to explain the passing of Time? To me?"

"If you had a better grasp on the concept I wouldn't have to listen to any of this complete and utter drivel because your protein chute would still be otherwise occupied!"

"My what?"

Dave thinks he might have said lol out loud but isn't entirely sure, because all he knows is that in something close to three minutes there will be a knock at the door, and this time the interruption will not be the Prince. It will be someone far worse, and should they be anything but ready to meet in the living room once again, he will not hear the end of it for the rest of his very long life.

Karkat asks what could be worse than the Prince climbing through a window to disrupt the moment they had both waited years, decades, to share, all while knowing fully well that it would more than likely never come to pass.

The response is a mere snort of laughter from Dave, who stands, having finally disentangled himself from both the blankets and the Knight, but does trust himself, just enough, to lean back over for one more kiss. Two more, then a third, for luck he says.

The knock comes right on cue.

"Fuck right off!" Karkat shouts, because Dave should not have trusted himself to leave it at a third kiss for luck, was so easily swayed by the compelling argument of a single hand dragging him back down by the front of his tunic.

"No," Dave mumbles, with a soft snort of laughter. "No, you can't tell her to fuck off like that, I want her to not hate you," he says, presses another kiss to the corner of Karkat's mouth, slowly, slowly, convincing himself to pull away.

"Oh, sorry, let me try again," Karkat frowns, obvious sarcasm in his reply. "Shut up! And if you're so much as thinking anything that isn't just a straight up well fuck, I guess I should definitely shut the fuck up right now, you can go choke on my bulge and fuck right off!"

"Holy shit," Dave says, the laugh bubbling out unexpectedly as he shoves Karkat back with a hand to his face. "You're an idiot with a death wish."

"Am I meant to believe that's new information to you or were the countless times I've literally written the words I'm a fucking idiot with a death wish not enough to clue you in?"

Dave just grins as he steps backwards over Caledfwlch, still lying on the floor in what he has decided is the perfect storage location for a sword, then pauses.

"Choke on your what now?"

Chapter Text

The Dark Kingdom of Derse, The Furthest Ring

It has been an enlightening twenty four hours at the end of a relatively dull eternity.

It is not even of particular note that her long-standing theories on travel through the Furthest Ring have been proven not only true but also correct. Of course they are true, and of course they are correct. They are theories - realities, now - built upon a combination of years of research and her Seer abilities. There was never any doubt.

She had equal confidence that Roxy would be able to navigate items across universes through the Void when required, although just how fast using her ability wore her down had been somewhat surprising. Not unexpected, really, considering the distance the items were required to travel in comparison to what she has been capable of in the past.

It is immensely satisfying to finally have proof of the Prince's long-standing communication with Prospit, because for all of her incessant poking and prodding of Dirk over the years he has not once given her a true answer to her questions on the topic. There is more to uncover there, so much more, but all in good time; too much poking and prodding only leads to a certain temporary death and she is far too busy for that.

Dave's return from across the Furthest Ring with the Knight of Blood in tow was an incredibly predictable move on his part, but she has been thoroughly tickled by the revelation that the other Knight is not entirely human. Even more surprising is that, somehow, the fact his paramour is of an entirely alien species does not seem to be freaking the absolute fuck out of Dave.

And considering she has witnessed him freaking the absolute fuck out over misplaced CDs in his collection, more than once, that feels significant enough to note.

It has only been a few minutes since her deliberately loud knock on the door of Dave's tower when they enter the living room, hair mussed and cheeks flushed, and sit on opposite ends of the couch as if the four inches between them will be enough to distract from the incredibly obvious fact that they have just had their tongues down each other's throats.

It is almost enough to warm her heart.

"What?"

Rose struggles to keep her expression flat when Dave snaps at her, his face pinched as he folds his arms over his chest. He is, by far, the softest of the Dersite Royals which is a difficult thing to be, she knows, has always found it too easy to love that about him, quite probably by design. His fingers tap along with what she knows to be the rhythm of Time, impatient for her response.

"Nothing," she says, knowing it will only infuriate him. "Is it so wrong of me to enjoy seeing you happy?"

"It's fucked up, is what it is," he replies. But his cheeks flush again, before he looks away. She glances at Dirk in the armchair beside hers, raises an eyebrow.

Dirk responds in kind, an eyebrow cocked in question, a move she is sure she learnt from him rather than the other way around, the pair of them far too similar for their own good.

Or anyone else's, not to put too fine a point on it.

He will let her continue to needle Dave for exactly as long as it takes for the Knight to fall just shy of the line between mere irritation and the verge of an anxiety attack. It is a fine line, one she has walked forever and will continue to toy with until the day he learns to stop making it so easy for her to get under his skin.

She loves him, truly, as much as she does Dirk and Roxy and quite probably more. But he is cut from a different cloth, in so many ways, and she cannot help but want more for him than herself.

The Knight of Blood looks uncomfortable with their familiar silence, each of them waiting for another to break first. Rose sips her tea, glances briefly at Dirk before she shifts her gaze back to Dave.

"I just have to know," she says, leans forward with her elbows on her knees, and Dave's eyebrows will be on the ceiling if he raises them any higher. "How does it feel to be a pioneer of interspecies relations on such an intimate level?"

The flush in his cheeks is now arguably more of a rash, has spread to his ears and neck, and she grins when he flips a dagger over in his palm simply for something to do with his hands.

"It feels like they'll name a cinematic award after me," Karkat interjects with a scowl and a middle finger raised in her direction. "They'll start production on an entirely new genre of movie and when the awards roll around they'll drag me up to give a speech and I'll say that it's a fucking honour to be known as the first troll to break that fucking boundary, and the King will roll on into downtown Prospit, fresh off the Battlefield, and he'll say, fuck, you did it, you fixed everything for everyone forever and fucking ever when you decided to be the first guy to ever smash your face into a weird human face for kicks."

Rose blinks.

"Fascinating," she says, slowly sitting back up in her chair.

"Can we please fuckin' get on with it so I can go crash the fuck out and hopefully find my way to an accidental permadeath in my fuckin' sleep?" Dave says, his face somehow even more red than before.

When Dirk shifts in his chair, elbows resting on his knees as he hunches over and starts talking, Rose knows he has let her have her fun.

"So, explain the process, broskis," he says. "Beginning to end."

"I write a letter, cram it into an envelope, and put it in the mail," Karkat says.

"That's it?"

The Knight of Blood sighs heavily, rolls his eyes. It's as dramatic a reaction as Rose would expect from Dave, and she suddenly understands exactly how their relationship has escalated to what it is.

"Do you want to know how often I get up to piss while I'm writing? How many times I have to chase meddling Seers and Sylphs out of my fucking room to get a modicum of privacy in that place? Oh, how about I tell you the exact thought process that goes into each and every page of complete and utter garbage I lovingly heap into an envelope? Of course that's fucking it, because that's how the postal system works. Can a human thinkpan even comprehend the idea that when you drop off mail, the postal system delivers it, or is that too complex?"

"You could have just said yes," Dave snorts.

"We both know I could the fuck not have," Karkat bites back.

Rose notices an odd flush to his face then, when he speaks, as if he's said something that he should find embarrassing. She almost asks but holds her tongue, because things have not been this entertaining in a long time.

"Okay, so you post the letter on your end, got it," Dirk says. "Whereupon it goes on an interdimensional journey as yet unspecified and ends up on Derse, somewhere and somehow, at which point, what happens?"

He looks to Dave to continue the train of thought.

"It gets delivered to me," Dave supplies, and his response is so anticlimactic that Dirk visibly frowns. He waits though, because usually Dave just needs more time to get to the point. "Directly, as often as possible. "Sometimes it shows up in my room, if there hasn't been a good time to do it the other way," he explains, eventually, and Rose can almost see the gears turning in his head as he chooses his words, so carefully.

"You know that the faster you get to the fuckin' point, the faster you can go get your nap on, right?" Dirk says, trying not to sound half as exasperated as he feels because sometimes giving Dave too much time only ends in him having to extract the information piece by piece, and he is too tired to drag out the conversation this time.

"Or," Rose begins. "You two could eve-"

She stops when the Prince gives her what is quite probably the filthiest look he has ever managed to give.

"Dave," he prompts. "C'mon, we all know it's illegal as dicks, whatever it is you've been doing, and I couldn't fucking care less about that if I tried. Surely you've figured out why I've been exploiting every fucking loophole Roxy's ever built into the network to contact our Prospit for decades by now, right?"

Dirk asks the question, and his tone is as gentle as it ever gets; Rose has always known that she and Dirk are very much on the same page when it comes to their Knight, a shared understanding of his softness and the inherent anxiety that fuels his every move beneath his well-constructed facade.

"Yeah," Dave scoffs.

"So?"

"The Droll," he admits, after another pause. "You'd have to ask the Droll."

No one will be asking the Courtyard Droll anything until we've all fuckin' slept through the night like good little princes and princesses, Dirk had declared after Dave's revelation.

Then he'd clapped the Knight on the shoulder, said goodnight, and disappeared from the living room in between blinks.

Dave is lying face down on his bed just thirty-six seconds later, including the time it takes to finally remove his fucking awful formal boots and tunic, both of which have been left in a pile beside Caledfwlch, and traded for his comfiest sweatpants.

It is just eight minutes past noon, and he has until the next morning to catch up on the sleep he traded in for a trip through the Furthest Ring.

Such a fucking incredible call on Dirk's part calls for nothing but the best, and the best is a pair of sweatpants the Archagent once gave him a citation for wearing out in public.

"Was your need to disappear really so urgent that you had to go and fuck right off like that, forgetting that some of us can only move at a regular speed? And that some of us happens to include yet another fucking know-it-all Seer because clearly the universe seems to think I need another one of those in my pathetic excuse for a life!"

"Yes," Dave responds, voice muffled by his pillow as the Knight of Blood enters the room two minutes later. "Lock the goddamn door, would you? Keeps her out, slows Dirk down. Don't know it'll do shit to keep Jade out on account of the Space thing, but she seems like she's got some kinda fuckin' manners at least, and Jake's a fuckin' wildcard but lock it the fuck up anyway," he goes on, still talking long after he hears the lock click, and pats the empty space beside him.

It takes a few moments, and more than a few muttered fucks as Karkat trips over Caledfwlch, but when Dave finally manages to drag one eye open against every instinct in his body, the Knight of Blood is lying next to him with one arm tucked up under his own head and the other resting on the mattress halfway between them.

"You're actually fucking tired right now," he says.

"I've been awake for twenty-eight hours and eleven minutes, and I stopped Time for an additional twelve on at least two planes of reality that we know of," Dave says, his eye closing again. "Yeah, I'm actually fucking tired right now. Aren't you?"

"I slept before."

"Can you sleep some more?"

"I doubt it," Karkat replies.

"Okay, so you can just watch me sleep like a fucking freak then, I'm cool with that," Dave mumbles. "Do whatever you want but don't leave the building. Agents and shit, doing Agent business, y'know?"

Then, suddenly, the way it always does, Time shifts and settles around him while he sleeps, moving on without him, drifting slowly forwards at the ever reliable rate of one second per second.

It is the middle of the night when he wakes, sluggish, still in desperate need of another eight hours, and sinks further under his blankets as he stretches out each limb in turn. The events of the day are a blur, moments of the Prospitian farewell flashing through his mind, of long, logistical conversations in the living room and Derse's core. The frigid temperatures of the Furthest Ring, and the warmth radiating from the Knight of Blood.

The Knight.

Prospit.

The Knight, on Derse, in his tower room.

"You don't have a fucking clock."

In his bed.

"Why the fuck would I need a clock, you fucking moron?"

Dave mumbles the response as he shifts up onto his left shoulder, buries his arm under his pillow to prop up his head. It takes longer than he would like to convince his eyes that they should open, and when they do it is not for long.

The Knight of Blood is lying opposite him, exactly where he had been nine hours and eighteen minutes earlier.

"Just tell me what time it is."

"Nine twenty-nine," he says with a sigh that he does not mean, not at all. "So did you sleep at all or what?"

"No, I just watched you sleep like a fucking freak the entire time," Karkat says.

"You're a lucky motherfucker to even get the chance," Dave gives a snort of laughter as he forces his eyes open again against their will. "Hey," he adds, softly. "Hi."

His hand reaches across the space between them, runs along Karkat's jaw, thumb stroking along his cheek as he watches the reaction to every move he makes. And when he tugs, a silent request to move closer, the Knight of Blood understands exactly what he wants.

It is such a subtle kiss, for a request that is anything but.

"You snore," Karkat says, kisses him again, less subtle this time, and pushes at his shoulder until he rolls back.

"Horseshit," Dave mumbles against him, and the arm suddenly freed from under his pillow winds up and around the back of Karkat's neck, buries itself in his hair, to keep him right where he wants him. "'m a fuckin' prince," he says, between soft, lazy kisses.

"Two things can simultaneously be true."

"Only nerds say shit like that."

"Dipshit."

"Rude as dicks," he scoffs. He drops both hands, one at a time, first from Karkat's nape and then his cheek, eyes studying the Knight of Blood closely when he moves away, just far enough that Dave cannot kiss him again without lifting his head from the pillow.

He frowns at the inconvenience.

Karkat is still leaning over him though, has one arm propping him up on either side of his chest.

"We still haven't talked about it," the Knight of Blood says, almost hesitant. "What quadrant this is," he clarifies.

"We talked about it enough that I told you I don't know what the fuck that even means," Dave frowns. "Does it actually matter at all or what?"

Karkat does move then, pushes himself back and away until he's lying on the other pillow with his hands covering his face.

He cannot explain how much it matters, yet, to him, not at all.

But he has never been one to pass on an opportunity to talk about quadrants in any way, shape, or form, so once the feeling of teetering on the edge of saying something stupid passes, he asks what he considers to be only a mildly stupid question.

He asks what human romance looks like.

The Knight of Time responds, predictably, with a vague and confusing explanation that answers the question but only just, in a uniquely unsatisfying way; I don't fuckin' know, I just know this is it.

So Karkat starts from the beginning.

He explains the difference between red and black romance, and conciliatory and concupiscent relationships. Defines the similarities and distinctions between a matesprit and a kismesis, and how vacillation is a common occurrence for some, and when it can be wise to bring an auspictice into the relationship. He points out the importance of hate and pity and the lifeline a healthy moirallegience can be for some.

He talks for so long and in so much detail that more than once he pauses because it has been too long since Dave said anything, and fears he might actually have gone back to sleep with an arm thrown across his chest and an ankle hooked over his own. But he is listening, or is at least pretending to, as his prongs tap out an unfamiliar, steady beat along his thoratic struts.

When he finally does apologise for the slap earlier, explains the implications of a pap, in public, how he was thrown off or distracted or confused, especially confused, because since long before the Knight of Time showed up on Prospit, from their earliest letter exchanges, he has not once been entirely sure of his own intentions for longer than half a page of writing before they shift, again and again, from one quadrant to the next and back.

"Is that normal?" Dave asks the question after a beat of silence. "To be that fucked up and confused about this shit, I mean?"

Karkat has to think, which is an embarrassing, fucked up thing to do because he has just spent what feels like close to an hour talking about the clear-cut differentiation between the different romantic quadrants.

"Not exactly," he says, trying desperately not to sound as unsure as he feels. "It's not unheard of. It's just," he pauses. "It's not how most trolls are."

"Cool, so you're a special kind of fucked up then, huh?" Dave asks with a laugh, the kind that is a clear indication he is only joking but not entirely sure that the punchline will land. "Because you're only supposed to feel one way or the other about all this, right? But you don't, you've just got some giant cauldron of fucked up feelings that's overflowing on account of me being such a basic bitch who's all gone and given you some kind of alien complex about the topic?"

"Pretty much," Karkat mumbles, and then Dave's nubs are on his cheek again after what has been an almost insufferably long time without his touch.

"That just sounds like the human way of doing shit but with extra steps," he says. "I mean, not exactly, because, and you gotta keep in mind that I'm mostly talking out of my ass about this kind of shit, but I've spent enough time being talked at about feelings by Rose that I'm pretty sure that cycling through twelve different emotions about the same person in the span of as many minutes is totally cool. Maybe it's just our particular brand of human and we're all fucked up too, but it seems that way to me, kind of, you know?" Dave says, and his face is buried against Karkat's neck, on his shoulder, and his breath is warm as he speaks. "Ask me again," he adds, curls his fingers along one side of his jaw, kisses underneath the other. "You schooled me on this shit so hard that now I'm a fuckin' expert, so ask me."

"Ask you what?"

"About what this is, the quadrant, I've got a legit answer now," Dave says, mutters it in between pressing countless feather-light kisses to his skin.

"A single hour of lecturing on the topic and you're suddenly an expert on troll romance?" Karkat asks, turning to look at Dave beside him.

"Yeah," he says, confident. "And it was more like a seventy-two minute lecture, in case you were wondering."

"I wasn't."

"Ask me."

"Can't you just say it without making me ask again? It's such a tired fucking cliche and every time I see it in a movie I want to gouge out my own look stubs because it's just like, fuck off, you both know the answer anyway because you're shitty caricatures of real personalities," Karkat says with a sigh, as Dave continues to kiss along his jaw, his cheek.

"You love movies especially when they're stinking piles of hot garbage," Dave points out. "You can't tell me now this shit is too embarrassing to ask when all you've done is hound me for an answer since you got here. Ask me. I'm Derse's top expert on quadrants right now."

Karkat gives a snort of laughter at that.

"Okay, so tell me, in your expert fucking opinion, what quadrant this fucked up, trans-planet, inter-universal, century long yet still somehow undefined relationship falls into," he says.

There is a pause then, as Dave shifts, moves over him with a knee on either side of his stomach. He leans forward, shoulders hunched, and kisses him again, so deeply, with so much purpose, that Karkat almost, almost, forgets he is waiting for the answer to a potentially life-altering question.

"Yes," Dave says a moment later, rests his forehead against Karkat's, takes in a much needed breath.

"Your answer to which quadrant are we pursuing is yes?"

"Yeah, because it's a yes to all of them, or like, three of them, I guess, because what's the one you need a third person for? That one, whatever that is, we're not doing that, no fucking way," Another kiss, then, needy, hands stroking his cheeks, through his hair. His own reach up and wind around the back of Dave's neck, hold him close. "That's totally allowed, right? You said it's kind of fucked up, yeah, but that's cool, I mean, I'm okay with fucked up."

Karkat does not reply immediately, because he cannot entirely process what the Knight of Time is offering.

He has always wanted for them to be red, because that is what he wants the most, the quadrant he has always wanted to fill more than any other. Every time his feelings have turned pitch, or pale, he has convinced himself that it is just a phase, that it will pass, that the next time he thinks about the Knight, or opens a letter, or picks up a blank sheet of paper, that his feelings will shift back to flushed.

And, most of the time, they do. But since arriving on Derse his blood pusher has struggled to keep up with the constant back and forth vacillation between quadrants, far more rapid than ever before, the swings more extreme now that he has the Knight of Time in arm's reach.

Even closer, as he waits for a response to an idea that is entirely fucking insane.

"Three quadrants?"

It is barely even a question but he asks it anyway.

"Despite three quadrants," Dave clarifies. "I told you, I don't care as long as we're something, and statistically three somethings has gotta be a better thing to be than just one, right?"

That is, somehow, the most romantic thing the Knight of Blood has ever heard.

The pulse beating through his blood pusher is red, so fucking red, as he tightens his arms around Dave's neck and leaves him no option but to move closer, and closer, until there is just barely space between them to take a breath.

He can see it, that the Knight of Time is about to say something else, because he cannot simply let the silence speak for itself. So he cuts off the thought before it can escape with a kiss, soft and lingering and full of everything he has held so close for so long, over and over again, and again, until there is no way that either of them can possibly be thinking of anything but the other.

The Page of Hope wakes with a start.

"Boy, howdy," he says into the unfamiliar darkness of Derse, a hand patting his own chest as his heart beats double time. "Oh, calm down old chap."

He knows his Aspect almost far too intimately. It delights him, of course, whenever there is a pulse of Hope through the universe, even when his heart picks up on the threads at the most inconvenient of times.

It is not the first time he has been dragged from his sleep by the sensation.

"What is it?"

It is, however, the first time he has accidentally caused another to wake with him.

The Prince of Heart does not sound like he has just been woken, is as alert as ever, and the Page finds it endlessly entertaining that he cannot relax, even in sleep. Or, he would, if he wasn't entirely aware of the Unbreakable Katana being within the Prince's reach at all times.

"Nothing to worry about, my good fellow," he says with a chuckle. "Just a marvellous moment of Hope passing somewhere in the nearby vicinity. It quite likes to let me know, you see."

"You're sure?"

"Oh, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind. Nothing to worry about. Shall we perhaps return to the land of slumber?"

Dirk gives a soft snort, almost one of laughter, and rolls over, hand moving to rest over the one Jake still has pressed to his own heart.

It doesn't take the Page long to fall asleep once again, not with the Prince beside him and his heart overflowing with Hope.